Average Delivery Time Across Postal Service Network Remains Stable

Double-digit gains in the adult fiction and young adult categories led to a 4.4% increase in unit sales of print books in the week ended July 23, 2022, over the comparable week in 2021, at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, five books by Colleen Hoover, and two new releases drove sales up 23.1% in adult fiction. Crawdads remained #1 on the category list, selling more than 123,000 copies. Led by It Ends with Us, Hoover’s top five titles sold about 295,000 copies combined. The new titles that cracked the top 10 in the category were Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Daniel Silva, which sold more than 40,000 copies, and Shattered by James Patterson and James O. Born, which sold more than 25,000 copies. YA fiction sales rose 15.6%. Jenny Han titles continued to do well, with five Han books selling about 83,000 copies combined. The top new release was Never Never by Serena Valentino, which sold about 9,000 copies. Adult nonfiction sales fell by a relatively mild 3.4% compared to the week ended July 24, 2021.

Macroeconomic troubles have prompted Zenith to lower its global ad-spend growth prediction to 4% for 2017, when total expenditures are now expected to reach $558 billion. That’s a downgrade from the 4.2% growth that Zenith had forecast in June. The June forecast was a downgrade from the 4.4% the Publicis Groupe media agency had forecast in March. Digital -- and particularly mobile -- continues to take dollars away from print media as consumers use mobile apps. The most rapid growth is coming from online video (+18%) and social media (+25%), while U.S. TV is still growing, only fractionally at 0.5% this year. American print media continue its steep decline, with newspapers falling 9% and magazines down 7.4% this year. Click Read More below for additional detail.

The international media, services and education company increased its revenues by 1.3 percent year-on-year to €12.1 billion (previous year: €12.0 billion). Bertelsmann's strategic growth businesses were particularly instrumental in this development: RTL Group's digital activities continued their dynamic growth, increasing by around 30 percent to €560 million. The music company BMG grew by 29 percent; the Bertelsmann Education Group recorded growth of 38 percent. Overall, the share of total revenues contributed by the high-growth businesses increased to 32 percent (previous year: 29 percent). Group profit increased to €694 million at September 30, surpassing the previous year's figure by 6.4 percent (previous year: €652 million). The result before sale of investments was therefore at a record level. With capital gains of €69 million, the Bertelsmann Asia Investments (BAI) fund once again made a high contribution to earnings. Click Read More below for additional information.