Can CEO Nihar Malaviya grow book giant Penguin Random House
December 16, 2022
In January, Nihar Malaviya takes over as interim Chief Executive of Penguin Random House (PRH), the world’s largest publisher of consumer books. Based in New York,. PRH owns nearly 275 publishing imprints, including Penguin Books, Penguin Classics, Penguin Press and Picador. Together, the imprints publish more than 70,000 digital and 15,000 print book titles each year.
“As a young boy growing up in India, I regularly walked 45 minutes to our local library and read each and every book in the children’s section,” Malaviya said in a memo to PRH staff, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Malaviya, 48, is currently President and Chief Operating Officer of PRH, U.S., responsible for supply chain, strategic project management, data science and market analysis, IT, and client services. Earlier, he led the integration of the operations and systems of Penguin and Random House, the largest merger in book publishing.
In 2001, Malaviya joined Bertelsmann entrepreneurs’ program. Two years later, he moved within the group to Random House. There his roles included leading digital strategy, eBook pricing, implementation of vendor-managed inventory, sales reorganization, technology infrastructure consolidation, supply-chain redesign, and production vendor renegotiations. In 2012, he was appointed senior vice president, Strategy, Analytics, and Program Development.
Before joining Bertelsmann, Malaviya worked on Wall Street: as a consultant to JP Morgan, 1996 to 2001, and a programmer at Salomon Brothers, 1994-1995.
He holds an MBA in Finance and Marketing from New York University’s Stern School of Business, 2001, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rutgers University, New Jersey, 1994. A Chartered Financial Analyst, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.
PRH is part of Bertelsmann, the German media, services, and education company that operates in about 50 countries. Its other businesses include the entertainment group RTL Group, the music company BMG, the service provider Arvato, the Bertelsmann Printing Group, the Bertelsmann Education Group and Bertelsmann Investments, an international network of funds. The company has 145,000 employees and generated about $20 billion in revenues in 2021.
Among the book imprints owned by PRH is Knopf Doubleday, a New York based publishing group. Ajai Singh (Sonny) Mehta was Knopf’s editor-in-chief. Mehta published works by Salman Rushdie as well as nine Nobel laureates in literature and memoirs by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
“Mehta delivered literary quality and runaway sales, backed by clever promotion,” an obituary in The New York Times noted. “Yes, there is something attractive about taking risks,” he told the newspaper in 1988. “I’m more marketing- and sales-oriented than others, and the notion of selling books continues to interest me.”
Mehta, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 77, left an estate worth more than $25 million in the U.S. to his wife Gita Mehta, an author, and son, according to The New York Post.
Malaviya will replace Markus Dohle, who served as the CEO of PRH for fifteen years. Under Dohle, 54, who is also an engineer like Malaviya, PRH more than doubled its revenues and quintupled its profit. Dohle, 58, resigned after a judge in October ruled in favor of the United States Justice Department’s opposition to PRH’s $2.2 billion purchase of rival book publisher Simon & Schuster (S&S). PRH and S&S are among the big five publishers; the others being HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan.
In her verdict, federal Judge Florence Pan stated that “It is significant that in a market already prone to collusion, where coordinated conduct already appears to be rampant, PRH’s acquisition of S&S would reinforce the market’s oligopsonistic structure and create a behemoth industry leader that other market participants could easily follow.”
Assuming Malaviya is confirmed as the CEO, he will have to figure out different ways to continue to grow PRH’s revenues and profits.
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