PRH to turn Grantham facility into new hub for PRH US in Europe

In the UK, Penguin Random House (PRH) UK’s Grantham Book Services warehouse will be retrofitted to become a new operational hub for PRH US to fulfil orders from customers in continental Europe, reported Publishers Weekly (PW).

PRH had previously announced the Grantham facility would close by the end of 2025 as the company closed its third-party distribution business. While the reversal of the decision to close the facility means a ‘significant’ number of the roughly 200 warehouse workers who were scheduled to lose their jobs will now stay on to operate the new hub, PRH UK emphasised that this does not mean the publisher has changed its mind about getting out of the third-party distribution business.

PW said the plan for the new hub appeared tied to Amazon’s decision to stop importing books for its UK and European online stores, instead requiring US publishers to source books closer to the point of sale, a move that PW said had cost US publishers millions of dollars in lost sales.

In a memo, PRH global CEO Nihar Malaviya noted that even as PRH UK continues to gradually shut down the distribution business, it is also building the logistics and systems capabilities for the new hub. Malaviya said the retrofitted facility was expected to be operational by the next European summer.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, the planned closure of Grantham’s third-party distribution business means UK independent publishers are finding distribution ‘particularly challenging’.

Category: International news