Authentic Brands Group is buying Sports Illustrated brand for $110 million.
Sports Illustrated's current owner Meredith Corporation will continue to publish the magazine’s physical and digital copies, after completion of the deal. Authentic Brands Group, on the other hand, will take charge of the business development, licensing and marketing of the magazine’s intellectual property.
Authentic Brands will acquire, as part of the deal, all Sports Illustrated brands including Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated Kids, Sportsperson of the Year, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, SI and SI TV. The company will also get the rights to Sports Illustrated's archive of 2 million photos.
Last year, Sports Illustrated was offered up for sale, along with Meredith’s other publications including Time, Fortune and Money magazines, which the company had come to own via its purchase of Time Inc. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff became buyers of Time in September, while Thai billionaire Chatchaval Jiaravanon bought Fortune in November.
The sale of Sports Illustrated brands should enable Meredith to pay approximately $900 million of debt by June 30, as indicated by the company.
Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D. has a degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow University and has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, investor, manager, and mathematician. His professional expertise is in applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, system and pattern analysis, and software and hardware system integration. He has served as the CEO of several hi-tech start-up companies and nonprofit organizations, which has given him proven capabilities in business strategy for high-tech start-up companies, market assessment, company formation, team building, product development, marketing, and sales. He has published numerous articles in journals and magazines on related fields. As a retail investor, he spent 15 years developing his proprietary trading and quantitative algorithms (now Tickeron’s A.I.), which brought him significant returns in trading the stock market. His current work and goal in founding Tickeron is to bring professional, sophisticated stock market analysis capabilities to retail investors via an easy-to-use interface.
a publisher of magazines and books and also operates television stations
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