Sales 2024: €18.988 billion

Overview

Bertelsmann: The world's largest media group in the late 1980s. Today, Bertelsmann SE & Co. KgaA (a privately held partnership limited by shares), headquartered in Gütersloh (East Westphalia-Lippe), is by far the largest German media group, active in approximately 50 countries and employing nearly 75,000 people worldwide. These include the RTL Group, the book publishing group Penguin Random House, and the music company BMG.

General Information

Headquarters
Carl-Bertelsmann-Straße 270 
33311 Gütersloh
Germany
Telephone: 0049 5241 80 0
website: bertelsmann.de/investor-relations

Branches of trade: Newspapers, magazines, book publishers, TV, radio, film/TV production, recordings, music labels, printing and media services, marketing, education
Legal form: SE & Co. KGaA (since August 2012)
Financial year: 01.01. – 31.12.
Founding year: 1835

Economic basic data (in million €)

	2024	2023	2021	2021	2020	2019
Revenue	18.988	20.169	20.245	18.696	17.289	18.023
Profit	1.036	1.326	1.052	2.310	1.459	1.091
Employees	74.607**	80.418*	164.691	145.027	132.482	126.447

* The significant reduction in the number of employees is due to the sale in April 2023 of the stake in Majorel (Luxembourg), one of the world's largest operators of call centers (more than 80,000 employees).

** The decline is mainly due to the sale of the DDV Media Group.

Sales by division (in million €)

	2024	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019
RTL Group	6.888	6.854	7.224	7.016	6.017	6.651
Penguin Random House	4.917	4.532	4.223	4.030	3.802	3.636
Gruner + Jahr	—	—	–***	1.032	1.135	1.355
BMG	963	905	866	633	602	600
Arvato Group	3.871	5.476	5.564	5.035	4.382	4.175
Bertelsmann Marketing Services	1.088	1.317****	1.448	1.319	1.362	1.568
Bertelsmann Education Group	924	876	622	283	301	333
Bertelsmann Investments	563	432	535	589	12	13

*** RTL Deutschland and Gruner + Jahr merged at the beginning of 2022.

**** On 1 January 2023, the direct marketing and printing activities of Bertelsmann Printing Group renamed to Bertelsmann Marketing Services.

Executives and Directors

Management:

• Thomas Rabe, Chairman of the Executive Board Bertelsmann, CEO RTL Group
• Carsten Coesfeld, Member of the Executive Board of Bertelsmann,
  CEO Bertelsmann Investments
• Thomas Coesfeld, Member of the Executive Board of Bertelsmann
  CEO BMG
• Rolf Hellermann, Chief Financial Officer
• Immanuel Hermreck, Chief Human Resources Officer at Bertelsmann

Supervisory Board:

• Christoph Mohn, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Chairman of the Board of the Reinhard Mohn Foundation, Managing Director of Christoph Mohn Internet Holding GmbH,
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Werner J. Bauer, Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board, former Chief Executive Officer of Nestlé AG for Innovation, Technology, Research and Development
• Dominik Asam, Chief Financial Officer and Member of the Executive Board SAP SE
• Núria Cabutí, Chair of the International Executive Committee of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA
• Günter Göbel, Chairman of the Group Works Council of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA
• Pablo Isla, Former CEO Industria de Diseño Textil SA (Inditex SA)
• Nitsa Kalispera, Executive Vice President, Global Supply Chain, BMG
• Bernd Leukert, Member of the Board of Management for Technology, Data and Innovation at Deutsche Bank AG
• Gigi Levy-Weiss, General Partner NfX, Angel Investor
• Jens Maier, Chairman of the RTL Deutschland Group Works Council
• Dr. Brigitte Mohn, Member of the Executive Board of the Bertelsmann Foundation
• Liz Mohn, founder and chairwoman of the board of the Liz Mohn Foundation and shareholder of Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH
• Hans Dieter Pötsch, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Volkswagen AG and Chairman of the Board of Management and Chief Financial Officer of Porsche Automobil Holding SE
• Henrik Poulsen, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Carlsberg A/S, Senior Advisor of AP Møller Holding
• Ilka Stricker, Deputy Chairwoman of the Group Works Council of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA
• Bodo Uebber, Independent Management Consultant, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Flix SE, former Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG, Finance & Controlling / Daimler Financial Services Núria Cabutí, Chairwoman of the International Executive Committee of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA

History

In 1835, the Gütersloh printer and lithographer Carl Bertelsmann founded a publishing house for Christian-Protestant literature. His son Heinrich expanded the business by acquiring publishers and building a printing works; his son-in-law Johannes Mohn added specialist journals and educational book series from 1881 onwards. In the fourth generation under Johannes Mohn's son-in-law Heinrich Mohn, from 1921 onwards, the publishing house grew continuously from the beginning of the Weimar Republic, primarily through popular novels, also with quite "völkisch-national" and anti-Semitic literature. During the Nazi era, Mohn wanted to passive SS member and publishers of Wehrmacht and Nazi literature ("Panzer am Feind," "Volk ohne Raum"), Bertelsmann became a model Nazi company. The company was particularly commercially successful with wartime books, which contained "blatant and often massive warmongering."

From 1999 to 2002, Bertelsmann, "as the first German media company at the time" (quote from the Bertelsmann website), commissioned an "Independent Historical Commission for the Study of the History of Bertelsmann in the Third Reich" (UHK) chaired by historian Saul Friedländer to examine its own history. "With this approach, Bertelsmann corrected the previously incomplete and misleading portrayal of its own history." The study was also published by C. Bertelsmann Verlag.

After the Second World War, Heinrich Mohn's politically untainted second-youngest son, Reinhard (1921-2009), took over the struggling book and church publishing house and transformed it into a global corporation. The recipe for success: so-called "reading circles," which offered books by subscription at discounted prices, as well as their own encyclopedias and atlases. Sales were ensured by aggressive door-to-door sales teams who lured customers to doorsteps and in city centers.

In 1958, Bertelsmann entered the music business with the founding of Ariola Schallplatten GmbH, and in 1969, the company rose to the top of the German media industry with a majority stake in the Hamburg-based magazine group Gruner+Jahr ("Stern," "Schöner Wohnen," "Brigitte," and "Capital"), founded in 1965 by Richard Gruner, John Jahr, and Gerd Bucerius. Under Bertelsmann's leadership, Gruner + Jahr became the first major German publisher to expand abroad, acquiring several titles from the "New York Times" magazine group in 1994 and the business magazines "Fast Company" and "Inc." in 2000. However, in 2005, to the surprise of industry insiders, the company decided to withdraw from the USA.

Bertelsmann had already gained international recognition in 1986 with the purchase of the traditional New York publishing house Doubleday Dell and the music division of RCA Records (with artists such as Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, and the Scorpions). In 1987, BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) was founded; Bertelsmann's music activities are still conducted under this name today. Mark Wössner was Bertelsmann's CEO from 1983 to 1998. Although he led the world's largest media group for a time (until Time Inc. merged with Warner Bros. in 1989), this phase also saw the scandal surrounding the falsified Hitler diaries in the "Stern" magazine in 1983.

Bertelsmann was one of the pioneers in German private television. On January 2, 1984, it founded the channel RTL plus together with CLT (Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion, a private broadcaster). Bertelsmann initially held a 40 percent stake. Renamed RTL in late 1992, it has since become Europe's largest private broadcaster.

1995: Bertelsmann founded the online service AOL Europe with AOL (America Online), acquired Pixelpark, the leading German multimedia agency, and invested in Internet activities, such as the development of the American online bookstore barnesandnoble.com and its European counterpart BOLIn order to have as much content as possible for e-commerce, which was highly valued by Wössner's successor Thomas Middelhoff (CEO from 1998 to 2002), Bertelsmann also bought the New York publisher Random House for 4.7 billion DM and the majority stake in the scientific publisher Springer from Heidelberg for just under one billion DM (Springer was sold again in 2003).

At the beginning of 1997, Bertelsmann merged UFA Film- und Fernseh-GmbH with CLT. Founded in 1917, Ufa, a Babelsberg-based production company closely linked to the history of German film ("Metropolis," "The Congress Dances," "The Blue Angel"), had already been acquired by Bertelsmann in 1964, at a time when Ufa was heavily indebted. Ufa was then renamed UFA. The merger first took place with CLT, followed in 2000 by a merger with the British company Pearson TV, creating the RTL Group.

In 1999, Bertelsmann also grew in the TV sector through the purchase of the production company Fremantle, the takeover of the Cologne-based broadcaster Vox, and a 47 percent stake in the news channel n-tv (in exchange for the "Berliner Zeitung"). The sale of shares in AOL Europe (50 percent) and the technology company Mediaways to AOL generated significant revenue. Middelhoff's successor, Gunter Thielen, Bertelsmann's CEO from 2002 to 2007, divested himself of many internet activities and consolidated the business: in 2004, for example, BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) and Sony Music merged. Due to declining membership and book sales, subsidiaries in Portugal, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and France were also sold. Finally, the legendary book clubs were dissolved as an independent corporate division on June 30, 2011.

In 2013, Bertelsmann returned to the music business: it bought "all outstanding shares of BMG Rights Management." By 2015, the "new" BMG was once again the world's fourth-largest music publisher, with rights to more than 2.5 million songs. And in 2020, Bertelsmann acquired the remaining 25 percent of Pearson's Penguin Random House shares. At the end of 2020, Bertelsmann expanded its book business with Simon & Schuster, the fourth-largest book publishing group in the United States, for more than two billion US dollars (and with authors such as Hillary Clinton, John Irving, and Stephen King).

In 2020, Bertelsmann earned more money than ever before—probably due to the coronavirus pandemic. Weak business segments were offset by strong ones; consolidated profit grew by over 30 percent to €1.5 billion, while total revenue fell only four percent to €17.29 billion.

management

Bertelsmann is managed through the Bertelsmann Verwaltungsgesellschaft (BVG), which holds 100 percent of the voting rights of all shares. It is headed by a steering committee consisting of three members of the Mohn family and three elected non-family members. The BVG was established to protect the interests of the Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Mohn family. It also aims to ensure the continuity of Bertelsmann's corporate culture.

At the beginning of 2012, Hartmut Ostrowski was replaced as CEO by CFO Thomas Rabe. Rabe, born in 1965, a Luxembourg native with a German passport, the "athletic and ascetic son of an EU official," immediately initiated a strategic shift: The group was to become more digital and international, above all. He wanted to achieve this through portfolio consolidation, digitization of core businesses, the creation of new growth platforms, and expansion into China, India, and South America. Bertelsmann also wanted to invest more in education. Furthermore, the printing division was to be consolidated into a single division.

2019 was a turbulent year. In April, RTL CEO Bert Habets unexpectedly resigned from his position "for personal reasons." This was likely due to Habets' weak leadership. "He was never truly familiar with the details," was criticized. This also included his difficult relationship with Nicolas de Tavernost, CEO of the French RTL subsidiary M6, and with the former head of RTL Germany, Anke Schäferkordt. Perhaps the matter was also related to the allegations of "embezzlement of millions of euros in company funds" at the online portal Stylehaul (shut down by RTL in June 2019). It was also said that Habets, as RTL CEO, had failed to adequately investigate the matter. In any case, RTL majority shareholder Bertelsmann refused to grant Habets discharge for the past fiscal year at the annual general meeting in April 2019.

Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Rabe then took over the top position at RTL after Habets' departure. After all, he was familiar with the company, having already served as CFO of the RTL Group from 2000 to 2005. The new dual role is certainly an unusual accumulation of offices for a German DAX-listed company. The press subsequently dubbed him "the most powerful Bertelsmann CEO of all time." Another important personnel change: Elmar Heggen, Chief Financial Officer of the RTL Group, a close confidant of Rabe. Rabe has always considered Heggen his extended arm. Another one reads: "The two know each other inside and out. The new tandem at the top will have to function smoothly. Because Rabe will be commuting between Gütersloh and Luxembourg."

In 2021, Bertelsmann extended Rabe's contract until the end of 2026. Supervisory Board Chairman Christoph Mohn commented: "Thomas Rabe is a strategist with outstanding analytical skills." He called the extension of his CEO contract "a clear sign of continuity in a time of ever-accelerating change." However, press reports from March 11, 2024, contradicted this: Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Rabe had announced his departure from the company. "My contract runs until the end of 2026. My plan is to then turn to other opportunities," Rabe told the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung."

The question immediately arose: Why is he making himself a "lame duck"? And unsettling his employees? Or is Rabe trying to put pressure on the owners to release him from his contract sooner? Naturally, there was immediate speculation about his successor. Gregory Lipinski, MEEDIA editor-in-chief, wrote that it was unlikely he would remain in office for another two years. "Although the Luxembourg native has brilliantly optimized the company's costs for the Mohn family and solidly positioned it for profit, he has failed to demonstrate a grand vision." Bertelsmann "urgently needs a leading figure with a suitable vision for the future. Otherwise, the Mohn empire risks slipping further in the global rankings of media companies."

On July 4, 2024, HORIZONT/dpa reported: "Second Mohn grandson joins Bertelsmann Executive Board: Two grandchildren of former Bertelsmann entrepreneur Reinhard Mohn are predicted to have great careers within the company. This is now becoming apparent." Thomas Coesfeld, one of the two grandchildren, who has been heading BMG's Bertelsmann music business for a year, appears to have a strong chance of succeeding Thomas Rabe.

Business segments

TV/Radio/Content/Press:
RTL Group: Europe's market leader in advertising-financed television and TV production. The group, in which Bertelsmann holds a stake of over 75 percent, includes holdings in 60 television stations (including RTL Television, Super RTL, Vox, N-TV in Germany, M6 in France, and RTL4 in the Netherlands), seven streaming services (e.g., RTL+, Videoland, 6play, Salto), and 37 radio stations.

RTL's production arm, Fremantle Media, is one of the largest developers, producers, and distributors of fictional and non-fictional content. Fremantle has offices in 27 countries, produces over 11,000 hours of programming annually, and distributes TV formats in over 200 countries.

Gruner + Jahr: Founded in 1965 by Richard Gruner, owner of a printing company in Itzehoe, Schleswig-Holstein, and publishers John Jahr and Gerd Bucerius, the group is now one of Europe's leading magazine publishers ("Stern," "Geo," "Brigitte," "Capital," "Schöner Wohnen," "Eltern," and "Art"). Its business focuses on Germany and France, where Prisma Media is one of the largest publishers. Digital offerings contribute a quarter of revenue and occupy leading positions in all segments, from news to people to living. G+J also holds a majority stake in the special-interest publisher Motor Presse Stuttgart ("Auto Motor und Sport") and has a stake in the Spiegel Group ("Spiegel," "Manager Magazin"). Madsack (Hanover) acquired G+J's shares in the DDV Media Group in Dresden ("Sächsische Zeitung") on May 1, 2024.

At the end of March 2025, RTL and Gruner + Jahr merged: television, streaming, radio, and print formats under one roof. Thomas Rabe: "No other media group in this country can create such a cross-genre growth alliance." RTL as a "powerhouse for independent journalism, inspiration, and positive entertainment."

Book publishers:
In December 2019, Bertelsmann announced the acquisition of the remaining 25 percent of Penguin Random House from Pearson for $675 million. Penguin Random House (New York) is the world's leading trade publishing group with over 300 independent imprints, 18,000 new releases annually, and approximately 700 million books, e-books, and audiobooks sold. Its authors include more than 80 Nobel Prize winners.

Subsequently, Bertelsmann also attempted a multi-billion dollar takeover of the US publisher Simon and Schuster. However, this merger failed after an antitrust lawsuit by the US government because a takeover could have significantly restricted competition in the US book market, as reported on November 1, 2022.

Music:
Bertelsmann, active in the music market since the 1950s, initially decided to merge its music business with Sony in 2003 "due to declining revenues." In 2006, the company also sold its subsidiary BMG Music Publishing to Universal/Vivendi. It also sold its 50 percent stake in Sony BMG in 2008. But that same year, the company reversed course. On October 1, 2008, Bertelsmann founded a joint venture for music rights marketing with the US private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR). In March 2013, it was announced that Bertelsmann had acquired KKR's 51 percent stake in BMG Rights Management.  

Today, BMG is the only global music company not based in the US (headquartered in Berlin). The fourth largest music publisher in the world (behind Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing, and Warner-Chappell Music Publishing), with 20 offices in twelve Core music markets, with more than three million titles and recordings.

Arvato:
Internationally operating service company that develops SCM solutions, financial services and IT services with a focus on automation and data/analytics for business customers worldwide.

Bertelsmann Marketing Services:
Formerly the Bertelsmann Printing Group, a division that bundles all direct marketing and printing activities. This includes the German offset printing companies Mohn Media, GGP Media, and Vogel Druck; the Book Printing Group in the USA; the Digital Marketing Unit, which includes, among others, the content agency Territory, DeutschlandCard, and the Dialogue business; and the Sonopress Group, which includes the storage media producer Sonopress and the printing and packaging specialist Topac.

Bertelsmann Education Group:
Digital education and service offerings with a focus on the healthcare and education sectors. In the fall of 2014, Bertelsmann acquired a stake in the online course provider Udacity and purchased the e-learning platform Relias Learning, which specializes in continuing education in the healthcare sector, for a three-digit million euro sum.

Bertelsmann Investments:
The Investments segment includes Bertelsmann's global venture capital activities and the growth area Bertelsmann Next. Around €1.9 billion has been invested to date in around 500 innovative companies and funds.

Current developments

At the end of March 2025, the group-owned media groups RTL and Gruner + Jahr merged. TV absorbed print. RTL Deutschland divested a total of 23 G+J magazines, eliminating 700 jobs. However, Hamburg remained Gruner + Jahr's headquarters. Television, streaming, radio, and print formats were now under one roof: Thomas Rabe, in his own words, was seized by a "slight euphoria." RTL and G+J: The two companies could "better exploit their growth potential together." They did not want to "simply continue working as before." "No other media group in this country can create such a cross-genre growth alliance," Rabe said. The media businesses on the German market are strengthened in competition with global tech platforms such as Netflix, Google, and Amazon. RTL is a "powerhouse for independent journalism, inspiration, and positive entertainment." However, one also read about the "end of an era," the demise of the "traditional and renowned publishing house G+J." "After 60 years: Bertelsmann is ending G+J," and then also sold "Brigitte," "Gala," and "Eltern" to the Funke Media Group.

Doubts about the RTL/G+J media alliance came from Austrian RTL founder Helmut Thoma, for example. "What's going to come out of this? Where, please, is all the great content going to come from?" Is it just a "marketing concept" to "wind up the former major publishing house G+J" (Handelsblatt)? Just the "technocratic fantasy" of merging two culturally very different corporations? At RTL, they made fun of the "left-leaning money-wasting machine" from Hamburg, at Gruner + Jahr of "the old trash culture." Or Andreas Lebert, once editor-in-chief of Brigitte (G+J), now heads the arts section at Die Zeit. What's happening at Bertelsmann is "completely incomprehensible" to him. He only has hope for Stern.