Penguin Books: Introduction To Modern Business :: essays research papers fc

Penguin Books: Introduction to Modern Business The aim of this essay is to comment on how, over the last six years Penguin Books Limited has grown and managed external and internal changes. Sixty one years ago, Allen Lane, the managing director of the Bodley Head, a British publishing company, revolutionised reading with the introduction of the first ten Penguin paperbacks. Today, over 600 million paperbacks are sold yearly. At a time when there was still little of entertainment, paperback books brought reading to the masses. Nowadays, paperback books bring reading to the world. During the last six years (1990-1996) Penguin Books Limited was faced with many "environmentalist pressures," with a continuous change inside the company, and competitors trying to imitate its successful innovations on both sides of the Atlantic. The major achievement in 1990 was the introduction of a new computer system into several parts of the Company. The Credit Control department was the first area and Stock Management, Invoicing Systems, Warehousing, Distribution and Sales Services followed. Now the whole of the Company's systems are incorporated and networked. During this period a new lists including the Twentieth Century Classics Series complementing the Penguin Classics, Arkana, the New Age list and Fantail, the mass-market children's list were introduced. Internal change that took place during that year was the closing down of the Penguin Bookshops (that expanded to include 12 shops during the last decade), leaving just one, the specialist Beatrix Potter "House of the Tailer of Gloucester", within the Group. This change took place due to the fact that the Company was conscious that it had to concentrate on the publishing rather than on the retail. This decision brought a successful completion of a management buy-out of the shops. This action also compensated the loss that the Company faced in august 1991, when Pearson (an international enterprise quoted on the London Stock Exchange with major media interests including many well-known names apart from Penguin, such as Longman, Pitman, Addison Wesley, the Financial Times, Westminster Press, Mindscape, Thames TV and Madame Tussauds) announced pre-tax profits of Pounds 40.7m for the first half of 1991- a drop of 58 per cent on the same period of 1990. In this period books fell from a trading profit of Pounds 2.1m to a loss of Pounds 13.4m with Penguin losing Pounds 8m. In the following two years no major changes have been recorded. Although, 1993 was generally a successful year for all Penguin group companies. Penguin UK had produced a strong programme including some major best sellers and agreed to a joint venture with the BBC for mass market paperbacks and film deals with two