• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 5, 2020

ViacomCBS is putting iconic, 96-year-old publishing house Simon & Schuster on the block.

"We've made the determination that Simon & Schuster is not a core asset of the company,” ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish said during a live-streamed session at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

“It is not video-based,” he added. “It doesn't have significant connectivity to our broader business. At the same time, there's no question it's a marquee asset that's highly valuable. I've had multiple, unsolicited inbound calls about that asset. So as this market stabilizes, we'll engage in a process and look at strategic alternatives for Simon & Schuster.”

ViacomCBS — which is also looking to sell CBS’s Manhattan Black Rock headquarters building to generate cash for its streaming initiatives — will seek at least  $1.2 billion for Simon & Schuster, a knowledgeable source told The Wall Street Journal.

Selling such valuable assets is “a tremendous value-creation opportunity," Bakish said at the conference.

Other publishers, including HarperCollins and Lagardére’s Hachette Book Group, are likely to be pursue the S&S acquisition opportunity, WSJ reports.

S&S, which publishes some 2,000 titles per year by authors including Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen King, Bob Woodward and Hillary Clinton, saw revenue decline 1.3%, to $814 million, last year. Over its history, S&S has published F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among other famous authors.

Despite competition from digital media options for consumers’ time and dollars, print book sales have been stable in recent years, and audio books have seen a steep rise in popularity.

In an internal memo yesterday obtained by various trade press, S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy told staff: "Whatever the outcome, this process does not change what we know to be true of Simon & Schuster: we are a great publishing house and one of the world’s best-known publishing brands, with an incredible legacy and bright future… we are a company that has always risen to the challenges we face.”

ViacomCBS reported lower revenues and a loss for Q4 2019, its first quarter as a combined company, and some analysts have questioned its streaming strategy.

But during yesterday’s event, Bakish again declared that the company has “real momentum and growing scale in streaming,” and again stressed the cost savings that will result from the synergies produced by the merger.

On the streaming front, ViacomCBS’s latest move was this week’s reveal of a tech upgrade and new branding campaign for its Pluto TV free streaming platform.

Last month, the company announced both an expansion of its CBS All Access service through tapping content from all of the company’s media brands and a new distribution agreement with Comcast, and a repositioning of Showtime, including the brand’s premium OTT offering.

It has also said that it's developing a “broad pay” streaming service.