In the first half of 2025, revenues at Bertelsmann rose 1.2%, to €9.1 billion (about $10.6 billion), and group profit dropped by more than half to €201 million ($234 million).
Despite "difficult conditions," Bertelsmann chairman and CEO Thomas Rabe called the results "solid" and said it expects "positive overall business performance for the full year." The company noted that the profit drop was "mainly due to revaluations in the investment portfolio, in particular due to currency effects." It also said that business outside Germany has grown to 74% of overall revenue and that North America is the single-largest market, representing 30% of Bertelsmann revenue.
Penguin Random House revenues rose 2.1%, to €2.3 billion ($2.7 billion), and operating EBITDA fell 12.4%, to €255 million ($297 million).
In a letter to staff, PRH CEO Nihar Malaviya said that PRH's "sales performance, achieved during a time of rising macroeconomic pressures and an overall slowing of consumer spending in some of our key markets, reflects both the broad appeal of our books and your continued excellence in publishing them."
He noted that "many markets, especially the Spanish, Brazilian, Colombian, Mexican, and Indian, are very strong, while the U.K. market is flat and the U.S. and German markets are particularly soft this year. What's especially heartening to me is that despite the state of the market, our publishers around the world are outperforming their local marketplaces, leading to our increase in revenues overall."
Malaviya attributed the decline in profitability to "rising costs in nearly all areas of our business. Even so, our commitment to invest in authors, publishing programs, and long-term capabilities has not wavered. In many of our businesses, we're publishing more books than we did last year, launching new imprints, and expanding the ways we connect readers with the stories that matter most to them."
Malaviya pointed to several of the house's recent successes, including Barbra Streisand's My Name Is Barbra, named Audiobook of the Year at the Audies; Alexei Navalny's Patriot, which received both Book of the Year at the British Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography; and Kristine Bilkau's Halbinsel, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in fiction.
PRH has "an incredibly strong global lineup of upcoming publications in the coming months," he continued. Among them: The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown, Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood, and The Rose Field by Philip Pullman.