John Wiley & Sons, Inc. - Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



605 Third Avenue
New York, New York 10158
U.S.A.

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Our goal is to satisfy customer needs for information and education, while generating financial results that yield attractive returns for all members of the Wiley partnership: shareholders, authors, and employees.

History of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A leading publisher of textbooks and professional books in science and technology and business, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. operates worldwide through its headquarters in New York City and through foreign subsidiaries in Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia. Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons began as a publisher of American fiction writers, then moved into the science and technology segment of the publishing market after the American Civil War. From the late 19th century on through the 20th century, the company continued to publish academic, professional, and scientific titles, achieving encouraging success as one of the oldest independent companies in all of American industry. Led by a succession of Wiley family members, John Wiley & Sons entered the 1990s with Bradford Wiley II, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the company's founder, in control. In 1995, the company derived roughly 40 percent of its total sales from outside the United States.

In the early 1980s, Bradford Wiley uttered the obvious when he told a reporter from Publishers Weekly, "I guess you can say that we Wileys are survivors." In reference to a family whose business dated from the time of the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, this comment by Bradford Wiley was an understatement. Chairman of John Wiley & Sons at the time, Bradford Wiley was the great-great-great-great grandson of the company's founder, who established a business during the dawn of the 19th century that would employ generation after generation of Wiley family members. Over the course of nearly two centuries the Wiley name was closely linked to the publishing business, a span of time that nearly encompassed the existence of the United States and charted the family tree of one of the oldest business dynasties in American industry. From the founder of the company to Bradford Wiley, to Bradford Wiley II, who directed the fortunes of the family business during the 1990s, a long line of Wileys orchestrated the growth and perpetuation of their publishing empire, creating one of the most venerable enterprises in the history of the country that John Wiley & Sons helped put on the publishing map.

Early History

The founder of John Wiley & Sons was not John Wiley, but his father Charles Wiley, the first of numerous Wileys to earn his money in the publishing business. Charles Wiley began all that would follow in 1807, when he opened a small printing shop alongside One Reade Street in New York City. Framed by a paperhanging shop on one side and a soapmaking shop on the other, Charles Wiley's business was a modest one, a trait of John Wiley & Sons that would continue to characterize the company for more than a century. Early on, however, the small shop on One Reade Street played an integral role in the emergence of the American literary movement.

During its first years in a young country, Charles Wiley's small printing shop served as a bastion for America's struggling yet superlative writers. Among the roster of notable writers whose words went to print at One Reade Street were Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and James Fenimore Cooper. Each was an associate of Charles Wiley, who helped establish Cooper as perhaps America's first major novelist by publishing The Spy in 1821. All of these famous authors outlived the instrumental Charles Wiley, however, who died in 1826, leaving the business he had founded to his son, John Wiley.

When he took control of the Wiley publishing business in 1826, John Wiley was only 18 years old, but his youth did not prevent the second generation of the Wiley publishing family from taking the company in new directions. John Wiley continued where his father had left off by bringing the words of American writers to the public, but he also embraced the English literary scene by shifting the company's geographic stance overseas, making the Wiley business the first American publisher to offer royalties to foreign authors. To a list that already included Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Cooper, John Wiley added such distinguished English literary figures as Charles Dickens, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During his tenure, John Wiley also launched Literary World, a book trade weekly that was in publication from 1847 to 1853, representing a precursor to the influential Publishers Weekly, which held sway in the publishing world during the 1990s. Other business avenues were pursued as well, including John Wiley's foray into selling nonbook items. The sale of pencils, school slates, violins, and stereoscopic equipment and pictures was added to the Wiley business, lending a hint of diversification to the operations at One Reade Street more than a century before such strategic moves would become a prevalent aspect of corporate existence.

The association the Wiley business had with the 19th century's greatest writers gave the company a unique and pivotal role in the development of the American publishing community. For the future of the company itself, though, the next Wiley to assume command of the company would direct the publisher toward the path it would pursue until the end of the 20th century. The years of disseminating the country's greatest literary works were over for the company. Ahead was the entry into a segment of the publishing market that would describe John Wiley & Sons during the 1990s.

Post-Civil War Shift in Business Focus

Taking over during the years following the American Civil War was William Wiley, son of John Wiley and a former soldier for the Union Army. Aside from being the son of John Wiley and thereby accounting for the corporate title the Wiley business adopted, William Wiley's influence on John Wiley & Sons was definitive. Trained as an engineer, the grandson of the company's founder instilled his passion for engineering and the sciences in the company he led, transforming John Wiley & Sons into a different type of publisher. Under William Wiley's stewardship, the company began publishing textbooks and professional books, a strategy that would fuel its growth for the remainder of the 19th century and carry John Wiley & Sons into the 20th century.

By 1914, when annual sales exceeded $300,000, four decades of operating as a publisher focused on science and technology books had propelled the company forward. Between 1875 and the beginning of World War I, John Wiley & Sons' sales volume tripled, as did its payroll, which by the mid-1910s numbered 18 workers. Instead of publishing the novels of Melville and Dickens, the company was making its money in another field, earning its largest profits from publishing books on mechanical and electrical engineering. Such would be the future of the company, as it focused its efforts on the less glamorous, yet nevertheless profitable, science and professional side of publishing.



During World War II, John Wiley & Sons' business received a boost after several of the company's texts were adopted for use in training Armed Forces personnel, one of the lucrative markets opened up to the company as a scientifically and technologically oriented publisher. Another lucrative market for John Wiley & Sons expanded dramatically after the conclusion of World War II, when college enrollment swelled across the country, as veterans returned home and economic prosperity spread from coast to coast. Sales of textbooks climbed steadily as college enrollment rose in the United States, while in Asia and in Europe, where countries struggled to rebuild themselves in the postwar era, the demand for textbooks increased as well. John Wiley & Sons answered the call by exporting titles to Europe and Asia, substantially increasing the company's international business.

Post-World War II Growth

It was during this postwar upswing in business that Bradford Wiley, the great-great-great-grandson of John Wiley, rose to the top of John Wiley & Sons' executive ranks, becoming president of the company in 1956. The company's first overseas subsidiary was established four years later in London, touching off a period of international expansion that over a two-decade period would see John Wiley & Sons foreign subsidiaries established in Canada, Australia, Latin America, India, and Singapore. On the domestic front, John Wiley & Sons sidestepped the prevailing trend toward consolidations and takeovers that produced numerous conglomerate corporations during the 1960s. Despite eschewing the corporate maneuvers of the day, John Wiley & Sons did go public early in the 1960s, making its initial public offering of stock in 1962. It also executed several acquisitions during the decade, most notable of which was its purchase of Interscience, which substantially strengthened John Wiley & Sons' list of scientific titles and for the first time steered the company into the area of encyclopedia and journal publishing.

After serving as president for 15 years, Bradford Wiley ascended to the top of John Wiley & Sons' executive ranks in 1971, the year he was named chairman of the company, and then during the ensuing decade watched over the family business as it evolved into a thoroughly modern corporation. After establishing a medical division in 1973, which a decade later would publish an average of 60 medical titles a year, Bradford Wiley took steps toward repositioning the company to compete in the future. Titles were grouped into product lines, and in 1978 John Wiley & Sons' business activities were restructured into four major groups, comprising the company's professional, educational, international, and medicine business areas.

By the beginning of the 1980s, as it had done for decades, John Wiley & Sons ranked as a leading publisher of textbooks and professional books in science and technology, with offices situated around the globe. In its 175th year of business, the company generated record high totals in sales and earnings, collecting $137 million in sales and earning slightly more than $10 million, fueling confidence that the years after 1982 would continue to bring robust growth. The company by this point in its lengthy history was publishing more than 1,000 titles, 50 percent more than a decade earlier, and with the groundwork laid for John Wiley & Sons' expansion into electronic publishing, expectations ran high, with company officials projecting $300 million in annual sales by 1987. The company's 175th year of business, however, marked the beginning of bad times. Quickly, confidence was replaced by consternation.

Faltering Steps During the 1980s

Amid the celebrations heralding the company's 175th year of business and its record financial highs, John Wiley & Sons acquired Wilson Learning Group, a company founded in 1965 by Larry Wilson, co-author of The One Minute Sales Person. A creator of training programs for businesses, Wilson Learning Group added a new facet to John Wiley & Sons' operations, giving the publishing company a new enterprise to help offset flagging book sales. Starting in the late 1970s, college enrollment in the United States began to ebb, causing the sales of college textbooks to drop as well. The sale of such books accounted for one-third of John Wiley & Sons' total annual sales, and as the growth of college textbooks fell from double-digit percentage figures, the Wiley publishing firm began to feel the pinch. By 1984, the growth rate of college textbook sales had dropped to 4.8 percent, significantly weakening one of John Wiley & Sons' chief markets. If help was expected from the 1982 acquisition of Wilson Learning Group, it did not materialize. The subsidiary had been given considerable autonomy, but that proved to be its undoing, as Wilson Learning Group recorded robust growth--expanding at a 30 percent clip--but posted paltry profits.

In 1986, Wilson Learning Group registered a $754,000 loss, prompting one John Wiley & Sons official to remark that the subsidiary was "growing in an undisciplined manner." Two years later, the subsidiary lost a deleterious $2.2 million, which, coupled with John Wiley & Sons' difficulties in the college textbook market, left the publisher hobbled. In 1988, John Wiley & Sons earned $4.7 million on $241 million in sales, totals that when compared with the record year of 1982 pointed to serious problems. In 1982, the company earned more than twice as much as it did six years later on slightly more than half the sales volume, a phenomenon that no one at John Wiley & Sons wanted to perpetuate.

Ruth McMullin, who was recruited from General Electric, was hired in 1987 as chief operating officer to lead John Wiley & Sons toward recovery. When McMullin was talking with a Forbes reporter two years after joining the publishing firm, she reflected on her assessment of the company at the time. "It was clear this company became complacent about its uninterrupted record of success," McMullin noted, "and complacency led to an inattention to being tough and disciplined." To bring back these qualities, McMullin reorganized John Wiley & Sons' businesses into three divisions--educational, professional and trade, and training--and sold much of the company's floundering medical division, as well as closing the company's West Coast distribution center. Further changes were in the offing, as John Wiley & Sons entered the 1990s and steadily moved toward complete recovery.

Recovery in the 1990s

A new management team took over during the 1990s, led by Bradford Wiley II, the son of Bradford Wiley and the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Charles Wiley. In 1990, John Wiley & Sons launched a sweeping strategic program aimed at restoring the company's profitability. The program called for the divestiture of poorly performing businesses, the strengthening of core businesses, and entry into new niches of the publishing market; its success restored the image of one of the country's oldest companies.

In 1991, the failing Wilson Learning Group subsidiary was sold, yielding John Wiley & Sons $30 million, and a medical book series was divested. A year that saw the company's college textbook sales record an encouraging gain also brought a new entity into John Wiley & Sons' fold. The law publications division of Professional Education Systems, Inc. was acquired, giving the company entry into a new publishing niche and marking the beginning of a concerted attempt to build John Wiley & Sons into a publisher of legal-oriented titles. Further gains were recorded in this area in 1992, when the company acquired Chancery Law Publishing Ltd. in the United Kingdom and the paralegal publishing line belonging to the James Publishing Group in the United States. By 1993, John Wiley & Sons' college division was recording double-digit leaps in revenues, concurrent with international expansion in Europe and Asia.

In a few short years during the early 1990s, John Wiley & Sons regained the luster lost during the mid- and late 1980s. By 1995, after recording 14 consecutive quarters of earnings increases, the company was generating $331 million in sales and posting $18.3 million in net income, achieving performance levels company executives had projected to reach nearly a decade earlier. Despite the less-than-spectacular performance demonstrated during the 1980s, John Wiley & Sons was firmly positioned for strong growth during the 1990s, its nearly 200-year-old presence in the publishing business and its resolute recovery during the 1990s sparking confidence for the future. As the company moved past its 190th year of existence and toward its third century of business, John Wiley & Sons was expected to continue its reign as one of the oldest companies in the United States and as one of the preeminent publishers in American business history.

Principal Subsidiaries: Wiley Europe, Ltd.; John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte. Ltd.; John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.; Jacaranda Wiley, Ltd.

Additional Details

Further Reference

Anthony, Carolyn T., "John Wiley at 175," Publishers Weekly, September 24, 1982, pp. 42-46.Poole, Claire, "Stubborn Patriarch," Forbes, February 6, 1989, p. 99."Wiley's Long March," Forbes, November 22, 1982, p. 155.

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