It's official. UA, everyone else at Flight, and all our colleagues at New Scientist, Farmers Weekly, Personnel Today, and indeed Variety, Beleggers Belangen, and The Lancet are no longer for sale.
So we're all staying part of the Reed Business Information division of Reed Elsevier for the foreseeable. News still being digested by everyone for the moment. For once I won't rush to comment!
(When I say UA is not for sale, I mean, you know, everything's got a price...)
Flight has just announced that we've bought JP aviation directories. The flagship product is the annual JP Airline Fleets Directory. A lot of you will know it - it's a pre-internet doorstop of a book that has thrived post-internet among the huge community of users that need a robust and reliable directory and can't justify paying for the type of high-end, realtime industry data that we also sell. You see it in control towers all over the place for example. And these days you can also get it electronically with updates.
JP is one of the grand old brands of the aviation information business and it's a real privilege to be associated with it.
As part of the deal we will also come to own the JP Biz Jet directory and the Buchair (UK) online shop, which is a particularly interesting diversification for us. The full details are a bit more complex - I've pasted the announcement below for those of you interested.
What it does for us is fill in another piece of the jigsaw as we seek to provide information solutions for the entire global aerospace community - all the way from the enthusiast to the power-user in industry. And what it does for the JP operation is secure its future in a competitive world.
It also shows that, even though we're up for sale ourselves as part of Reed Business Information, it really is business as usual.
...expensive though, I come with the rest of Reed Elsevier's print and electronic business products. Together it's all known as Reed Business Information and you'll need awfully deep pockets to become the proud new owner. Feel free to drop me a line (with many zeroes in it).
Having written about the sales of more companies and company divisions than I like to think about over the past 20 years it's a very odd feeling to discover this morning that now it's my turn. We were rather elegantly told by Blackberry message just as the market learned about it. Which is reasonable as we're part of a major public company.
All the colleagues I've spoken to so far are pretty upbeat about the situation. Although there are plenty of lurking issues from the employees' perspective.
Wish us luck.
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