United Business Media's reshuffling of resurgent U.S. publisher CMP follows a number of recent successful moves by CEO David LevinLondon-based United Business Media (UBM.L) is hardly a household name. But ask people in the tech industry if they have heard of Interop or Web 2.0 conferences—all now fully or partially owned by UBM—and they will immediately recognize those brands. Or ask U.S. tech-heads if they know CMP, a well-known U.S. publisher behind core technology publications such as InformationWeek, and few would know UBM is the parent. That relative obscurity suits UBM Chief Executive Officer David Levin just fine. "We do not need the corporate brand to be well known, we need the individual brands to be known because that is where the passion is in these narrow communities," Levin says.
Levin is an activist boss. The former mobile industry executive has achieved a radical transformation at CMP, which was once heavily and disastrously dependent on print products for its revenue. On Feb. 29, UBM announced that CMP would be broken up and integrated into four market-focused businesses, a move UBM says it hopes will allow each new entity to operate closer to its customer base. While CMP used to get only 25% of its revenue from nonprint sources, now it gets 62%. CMP's profits, which were $70 million in 2000, plunged into losses of $12 million by 2001. In 2007 they shot up 30%, to $50 million, from $38 million in 2006.
Mixed Media Aimed at Business
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