“The information about nine-month sales is not relevant because it comes after the summer season which is slow as far as book trade is concerned,” said Silviu Lupescu, general manager of Polirom.
“The last three months of the year are usually the best for publishing houses.”
Polirom’s foreign author portfolio includes Nabokov, Hemingway, Lessing, Fowles, Rushdie, Saramago and Salinger. The company works with bookstores in Romania and the Republic of Moldova.
The main shareholders of the publishing house are Adrian Butuca (54.04%), Silviu Alexandru Lupescu (17%) and Irina Oana Dolhascu (13.2%), according to the latest data available.
Polirom ended 2015 with 21.8 million lei (EUR4.8 million) revenue, slightly up on 2014 and RON1.4 million net profit, the same as the year before, according to Finance Ministry data.
“The last two or three years have somewhat invigorated the book market, even though we still have not been able to recoup the significant decline caused by the crisis. However, we do not have exact figures to show the size of the market in the country or about sales by subjects (fiction, non-fiction, children’s books).”
Polirom has published 275 new titles so far.
“We will probably get to 300 by yearend. If we take reissued titles into account, Polirom has more than 2,000 titles available at the moment.”
Book consumption puts Romania at the bottom of the EU ranking. The market has dropped almost 40% in the last few years, reaching about RON350 million in 2014, according to ZF estimates based on financial results posted by the largest companies in this industry. In comparison, the revenue of the companies whose core business was retail sale of books in specialized stores stood at RON542 million in 2008, according to Finance Ministry data.
Most books in Romania are sold in bookstores, although many publishing houses have added other sales channels such as Internet.
The book distribution segment is not well developed in Romania. A number of bookstore companies have gone insolvent in the past few years. After Diverta filed for insolvency in 2010, Suceava-based Sedcomlibris, which operated 30-bookstore chain Alexandria went insolvent, too. The bookstore chains in Romania include Carturesti, Diverta, Compania de Librarii Bucuresti and Librarium at the moment. (EUR1=RON4.5093)
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)