Business Case Study: Harlequin Enterprises: The Mira Decision

Harlequin Enterprises: The Mira Decision

Company Background.

Harlequin Enterprise is a world’s printing and publishing company in the media and entertainment sector that is rich in entertaining and enhancing experience for women to enjoy and share. It has been in existence since 1949 and still after almost 55 years is still the largest publisher of romance fiction in the world. The enterprise has seen tremendous success following the past record sales to date. It has acquired other several big publishing enterprises such as Mills and Boon in 1971, and was recognized as the world’s largest publisher of women’s series romance fiction which attracted Torstar a newspaper publisher to acquire all of Harlequin Enterprise Ltd. The level of recognition

Through the standing orders, this enables harlequin to predict the exact sales and returns thereby benefiting from low costs of production to achieve a better margins than the traditional publishers. (Exhibit 3 shows a comparison between Harlequin’s series business model and a traditional single title publishers).

Threats

Some of harlequin’s popular authors are moving to other single - title publishers which threatens its position in the market since they do not meet the demand of their authors who wish to publish a single-title book.

In the recent years, online romance series have increased with mainly the women segments being the target audience for most publishers especially the single-title romance that makes it very competitive for harlequin to maintain its loyal customers given the wide varieties available online.

Harlequin’s total dependence on a single segment especially the women group and not all the sex makes it challenging for the enterprise unlike their competitive and this can be a threat for them to maintain momentum in the single-title romance market, a careful thought that needs to put into