The editorial acronyms, the bookstores on the national territory, the two e-commerce channels (lafeltrinelli.it and ibs.it) and now 100% of the Holden School: the Feltrinelli group is expanding further and doing so by taking over all the shares of the reality founded in 1994 by Alessandro Baricco.
The publishing group announced this in a press release on 8 February, in which it announced that the Turin writer will retain his role as principal of Holden and as a member of the Board of Directors for life. The operation leads to the birth of the new Feltrinelli Holden hub, formed by the integration of two entities: the first writing and storytelling school in Europe, which is now 30 years old, and Feltrinelli Education, a platform that offers professional and cultural training courses (especially to companies).
It is Massimiliano Tarantino, communications director of Feltrinelli, who explains this operation to the “Corriere”: “They are two realities that take on the same consistency and the same guidance, an administrative-financial one by Giuseppe Morici (vice president of the Feltrinelli board of directors , ed.) and an editorial-educational by Baricco”. The writer, who is 66 years old, underwent a second marrow transplant last summer (after the one in 2022) against leukemia.
The “friendship” between Holden and Feltrinelli began in 2012: “The initial intuition was Carlo Feltrinelli himself – Tarantino recalls – and from there there was a minority position on the part of the group (with an initial participation of 25.1%) and subsequently a majority (51.5% in 2019)”. The latter had led the School “to become the great Holden in Borgo Dora, Turin, to renovate the headquarters and expand the offering, to the point of becoming the first writing university in Italy, accredited by the ministry and with European ambitions” .
Tarantino then explains that the last share acquired belonged to Baricco and the partners who accompanied him here: Oscar Farinetti and Andrea Guerra. “What if it was a purchase that had been planned for some time? It’s a natural convergence. And Baricco to some extent accepted first a sniff, then a confluence that allowed Holden to become bigger, and now a desire to take it on a more integrated, ambitious path, where it is important for us that he guides us.” .
With the Education hub the group therefore wants to invest in training, “an important piece that broadens integration with our other two dimensions: bookshops (Canals hub) and books (Contents hub)”. With investments in: the new generation of writing, the new applications of storytelling also in corporate training, those who also want to enter the international market.
«Today, by moving to 100%, we want to expand the possible synergies – concludes Tarantino – and better develop talents to renew the writing supply chains in Italy. It is a medium-long term, strategic investment. We want this hub to become, as Alessandra Carra, our CEO, has always said, the third cornerstone on which the future of Feltrinelli rests”.
2024-02-08 21:08:08
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