Mondadori submits a bid to acquire Hoepli's scholastics

The Italian scholastic publishing risiko enters a new phase. Mondadori has announced that it has submitted an offer to the liquidator of Hoepli to buy the scholastic business of the historic Milanese publishing house, following the appointment of the liquidator on 10 March.

The communiqué is dry, but the signal is very clear: the industry's leading group wants to take advantage of this window to intervene in a market that is already undergoing rapid restructuring.

Italian school publishing is worth around 800 million for new, plus around 150 million in the second-hand market. And it is already a highly concentrated sector. The Antitrust Authority, in closing its fact-finding investigation in January, indicated Mondadori as the leading national operator with a share close to 32%, ahead of Zanichelli at 25%, Sanoma at 13.5% and La Scuola at 8%.

It is within this framework that the Hoepli game takes on particular weight. According to press reconstructions, the school catalogue of the Milanese publishing house would have a market share of around 2.5%, in a group that has ended up in liquidation against the backdrop of tensions between shareholders and the failure, in recent months, of attempts at a broader solution. According to these reconstructions, in 2025 Mondadori had already sounded the ground for the entire publishing complex, without reaching the finishing line.

The industrial logic is obvious: in a sector crushed by denatality, price pressure and a still surprisingly unexploited digital, growing by external lines is evidently seen as the quickest way to defend scale and sales network.