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Post Now an 'Education and Media' Company
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Post Co. stock is up about 6 percent since the beginning of the year but it has fluctuated with the market since summer. It closed down nearly 1 percent yesterday, at $792.50 per share. Graham has resisted calls to split the stock, preferring to maintain the high price to keep out casual investors seeking short-term returns.
The Post newspaper's average daily circulation peaked at 832,232 in 1993. It now sells an average of 638,800 papers Monday through Saturday. Operating income for the company's newspaper division, primarily The Post, plummeted 50 percent during the third quarter this year, compared with the third quarter of 2006. The paper's income has been ravaged by a sharp drop in real estate advertising and the continued defection of classified and employment advertising to the Internet.
In 2006, the newspaper division reported $63 million in operating income, and it looks to be on pace to approximate that number this year. By comparison, in 1989, the newspaper division had $176 million in operating income.
Kaplan, meanwhile, showed a 21 percent revenue gain through the first nine months of this year, compared with the similar period in 2006, though the company recorded a 12 percent operating loss, owing to problems with its Score tutoring business for younger students and the high cost of its stock compensation to such executives as Grayer. The company is shutting down about 75 poorly performing Score centers around the country and revamping the curriculum.
Kaplan, which was launched by Stanley Kaplan in 1938 as a tutoring business in Brooklyn, now gets more than two-thirds of its revenue from education services other than test-prep, chiefly higher education. Kaplan courses range from pre-K to professional training and law -- the company offers a three-year, online law degree accredited in California. It has about 11,000 full-time and 17,000 part-time employees.
Kaplan has grown on its own and through aggressive acquisition. Over the past two years, Kaplan has purchased, or bought into, education businesses in the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Hong Kong and China.
"If you look financially, this is the new reality and seemingly the future," said Lee C. Bollinger, a Post Co. director and president of Columbia University. "But if you look in terms of the emotional core of the company, not just the financial realities, I think Don has always represented that the Washington Post newspaper is the lead institution."
Staff writer David Cho contributed to this report.
