Financial-Economic Profile of Firms in the European Publishing Industry

In the field of cultural industries, the publishing sector is one of the most important areas due to its huge turnover, the number of jobs it generates, and its contribution to GDP, amongst other factors. This sector has been the focus of numerous studies for many years, from a variety of standpoints such as: supply and demand, global markets, intellectual property rights, digital formats, and so on.The present study seeks to gain an understanding of this sector from the viewpoint of the financial situation of the firms involved, exploring such aspects as size, specialization, and financial economic profile. The goal is to gain further insights into the sector, describe it and to define a classification of firms that display similar financial-economic features, by applying multivariate size-reduction techniques in order to pinpoint the key factors in their financial structure that will enable us to form homogeneous clusters of firms.