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Monday, June 15, 2015

SEC Filing Sheds Light on B&N Education

Details about Barnes & Noble spinning off its education division recently came to light in a report from Shelf Awareness. Shares of B&N Education, applying to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, will go to current stockholders and no dividends are expected to be paid in the near future.

According to the filing with the Security and Exchange Commission, B&N Education saw its revenue increase to $1.5 billion while its net earnings fell to $19.4 million in the first three months of the current fiscal year, which closed at the end of January.

The filing also noted that B&N Education operated 717 college stores and that its largest area of growth is through its school-branded e-commerce sites at each. The company is planning to increase that number by bidding aggressively on the 53% of college stores still operated by their institutions.

“The prospectus is highly optimistic as to the new company’s prospects,” Nate Hoffelder noted in his post on Ink, Bits, & Pixels. “I, on the other hand, can see that B&N Education faces strong competition in a declining market. It’s not just that students are buying less from their college bookstore, or that B&N Education’s digital textbook offering is a train wreck, but also that it has a couple of established competitors (Follett Higher Education and Nebraska Book Co.) as well as an aggressive newcomer (Amazon) with extensive retail experience and a kill-all-prisoners attitude.”