The Clean Plate Club

HM Riverdeep had too much on its plate so it shared the bounty with Cengage. Waste not, want not, and there's students starving for knowledge in university.

What is a Cengage, you might ask, as a name like that must surely have been generated by a computer spewing random letters. It used to be Thomson Learning, which pretty much describes what it does. Cengage still does the same, only with a bizarre name. Marketing majors, roysh.

At any rate, HM Riverdeep had more than it could comfortably digest, financially speaking, and so the Houghton Mifflin component sold off its college and upper level education arm to Cengage, which specializes in that very portion of educational publishing materials. In return, the minnow gone whale acquires $750 million in desperately needed cash.

The Cayman Islands-based firm will not abandon Cengage to its fate, but has agreed to work together to market Cengage products to U.S. secondary schools. The affected Houghton-Mifflin employees need not feel entirely abandoned, as they are not to be cast adrift without a life line.

Cengage will obtain financing from the Royal Bank of Scotland, along with an investment from equity firm Apax Partners. Cengage's current owner, OMERS Capital Partners, is also going to kick in to the kitty, and expects to make some tidy profits when the dust settles. As a pension plan, OMERS will be very much interested in the bottom line, and there's no telling how much they'll care about publishing.

At least Barry O'Callaghan wants to be the head of the biggest educational publishing materials company in the world. If you're keen to produce quality teaching materials, who'd you rather work with?