CMP scales back international efforts

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 15, 1996

* Mired in bruising ad markets and saddled with high operating costs, CMP Publications has sold Communications Week International and Communications Week International Latinoamerica to EMAP Business Communications. CMP retains a small interest in the titles, but terms of the deal could not be determined. The Manhasset, New York-based publisher still operates Informatiques Magazine in France and, through a joint venture, Computer Reseller News/Germany. But the company's future foreign efforts will be restricted to licensing deals, sources say, as CMP concentrates on opportunities in the United States. CMP executives could not be reached for comment.

Although the biweekly Communications Week International is well regarded editorially, CMP was unable to profitably break into the international telecom market. And although English is the international language of telecommunications, ad decisions and reader desires are decidedly local. "Pan-European titles just don't work," says a source close to the company. What's more, marketshare leaders have adopted a scorched-earth policy toward American interlopers, making the economics of controlled-circulation titles that much more difficult. All of the eight European titles operated by Ziff-Davis Publishing, by contrast, carry paid circulations.