Panini (company)

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Panini SpA

logo
legal form Società per azioni
founding 1961
Seat Modena , ItalyItalyItaly 
management
  • Aldo Hugo Sallustro
Number of employees > 1000 (2017)
sales EUR 536 million (2017)
Branch Printing , publishing
Website www.paninigroup.com

The Panini SpA is an international Italian group of companies mainly engaged in printing and publishing industry operates.

The Modena- based company is best known for its scrapbooks and stickers . In addition, the group of companies is active in another five areas, these include publishing, sales, licensing, Panini Digital and new media .

The Panini Group is active in more than 120 countries and outside Italy also has its own subsidiaries in Brazil, Chile, Germany, France, Great Britain, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey and the USA. In 2017, Panini SpA achieved a turnover of 536 million euros with more than 1000 employees.

history

The current company was founded in 1961. Its roots go back to 1945, when Veronica Panini bought a newspaper stand in the old town of Modena, which her mother Olga initially ran with her sons Benito and Giuseppe. In 1954, a newspaper distributor was founded under the name Agenzia Distribuzione Giornali Fratelli Panini .

In 1961 the Panini brothers, who were also joined by Umberto and Franco Cosimo Panini in 1963, published the first scrapbook with 90 stickers of Italian football teams after initial failures with scrapbooks of flowers. Initially, the packets with the collective pictures were produced by hand or at home; a butter churn was used to mix the pictures. In the 1970s Umberto Panini invented an automatic packaging machine called the Fifimatic , which ensures that there are no duplicates in a package.

As a result, the business was expanded internationally, including sales in Germany from 1974. The company was run as a family business until 1988, before it was sold to the Maxwell Group . This changed the management and implemented further changes, which, however, had a negative impact on the business due to different corporate cultures.

In 1992 the company, which had meanwhile got into financial difficulties, returned to Italian ownership when it was taken over by the investment company Bain Gallo Cuneo and the De Agostini group. Under the new owners, Maxwell's management changed and the company got back on its original course. After completing a two-year restructuring phase, Panini was sold to the American Marvel Entertainment Group . This continued the course taken by Bain Gallo Cuneo and De Agostini and founded Marvel Italia ( Panini Comics since 2001 ), a comic publisher that was integrated into the Panini group.

In 1999, the company was transferred to Fineldo SpA, which was controlled by the industrialist Vittorio Merloni ( Indesit ), and was thus back into Italian ownership. Since then, Panini has been managed by Aldo Hugo Sallustro, who holds a significant minority stake.

Scrapbooks, stickers, trading cards

The first Panini scrapbook was published in 1961 and contained Italian soccer teams and players from the Italian soccer championship 1961/1962. Although the offer was later expanded to include other areas, such as anime figures with Captain Future in the early 1980s , football was for a long time the real main theme of the scrapbooks. At the international level, scrapbooks for soccer world championships were initially sold , for the first time at the soccer world championship in Mexico in 1970 . The sticker collection for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina was the first to be officially available in Germany. During the 2006 World Cup, 800 million stickers were sold in Germany alone. In 1979 Panini published the first scrapbook of the Bundesliga in cooperation with Bergmann Verlag . Since the European Football Championship in Italy in 1980 , Panini has also been issuing scrapbooks at every European Football Championship . The first Panini EM scrapbook officially available in Germany was the one for the 1984 European Football Championship in France. With 682 pictures at 18 cents each, the scrapbook for the 2018 World Cup is the largest and most expensive soccer scrapbook that Panini has released to date.

In addition to scrapbooks in the fields of sports and entertainment (Walt Disney themes, Harry Potter, for example) with the associated stickers, Panini also issues trading cards for various sports as well as anime and comic characters. In 2019 Panini released a scrapbook for the first time on the occasion of the Tour de France , after there had been a volume in the field of cycling in 2017 on the occasion of the 100th Giro d'Italia .

Stochastic investigation into Panini collection picture albums

The Panini picture album albums are, in the mathematical sense, classic picture picture albums, the mathematical investigation of which is called the picture problem . The results can be used to explain why multiples must be purchased in the scrapbook to fill the scrapbook. Optimized strategies are also developed how a scrapbook can be filled as cheaply as possible, taking into account effects such as swapping or buying new pictures.

In the media and online forums, it is often claimed that the collective pictures do not appear equally often in the packages or that there are too many duplicates. A journalist from Spiegel online examined the sticker special edition for the soccer World Cup 2014 together with the website stickermanager.com for the assertion of the group that each of the total of 640 different stickers is printed in the same edition and therefore with the same probability of reaching the consumer . By looking at the processed database of 8.33 million entries, the statistician Christian Hesse came to the conclusion: "The serious differences cannot be explained by the effects of chance alone." In contrast, the edition for Swiss , which is produced separately and optically is distinguishable. Here the 2.36 million registered stickers are equally frequent.

However, it could be proven statistically and mathematically that the collective pictures are not randomly distributed on the parcels. This is due to the special manufacturing process with the Fifimatic packaging machine, in which there is insufficient mixing. However, this does not constitute fraud, but rather an advantage for the collector, since in wholesale packs, so-called displays, there are far fewer doubles than with random mixes.

The number of images can vary from year to year. For the 2018 World Cup in Russia, 682 different images, including 50 special stickers, are offered.

Comics and publishing

Comics will be given away at Comic Con Germany in Stuttgart 2017

The comic and publishing division is Panini's second most important business division and emerged from Marvel Italia , which was founded in 1994 . Today, it includes numerous comic, superhero and manga series such as Batman , Hulk , Spider-Man , Wolverine and X-Men , but also novels , books for young people , magazines , calendars and characters , all sold under license . In total, Panini publishes over 4,000 comics, magazines and books in Europe and Brazil every year.

Panini Verlag in Germany

Panini stand at Comic Con Germany 2018
The Panini stand at Comic Con Germany 2019

Panini has been represented in Germany since 1974. Initially based in Munich , the headquarters of the German subsidiary were relocated to Nettetal in 1993 . At the same time, the Austrian and Dutch branches were incorporated.

On the German market, Panini sells products that are also sold in other countries, such as scrapbooks for soccer world championships and European championships, comics, magazines and books for young people. Until 2008, Panini also published a scrapbook for the Bundesliga in Germany. This was first published in 1979 in cooperation with Bergmann Verlag. In March 2008, however, Panini lost its license for the German Bundesliga until 2012 (3 years from the 2009/2010 season) to its American competitor Topps . Thanks to an agreement with the competitor, the last Bundesliga sticker album was released in the 2008/2009 season.

In 2003, Stuttgart- based Dino Entertainment was taken over, which has since been operated as the second German Panini location. Panini thus rose to become one of the three market leaders in the German comic market as well as the second largest youth book publisher in Europe. Around 70 people are employed at the headquarters of Panini Germany in Stuttgart. The German subsidiary publishes 130 book titles, 121 comic books, 70 magazine titles and 20 to 25 sticker collections every year. The publishing program also includes DVDs and calendars. In 2011, the LIMA association awarded Panini the title of Licensee of the Year for the fourth time.

In September 2008 Panini also entered the market for video game magazines and published two magazines, consolPlus (console games) and GamersPlus (PC titles), which deal with computer games. In 2010, Panini parted with the two magazines, which from then on were published by the in-house publisher consol.MEDIA until they were discontinued .

In August 2010 Panini announced that it would move the headquarters of its German subsidiary from Nettetal to Stuttgart. In September, it was also decided to move Panini's headquarters to Rotebühlstrasse in Stuttgart. Panini had already been represented at the new headquarters since 2003 with the product areas of magazines (for girls, women and boys), comics / mangas, books as well as production and sales. The management as well as the sticker, magazine (for children) and DVD divisions have been added since September 1, 2010. Women, which started with the titles sensa and LandKind , were added to the kids, boys and girls areas at the beginning of 2013 .

Since March 2015, “Mein Papst”, a monthly fan magazine on Pope Francis, has been published - an adaptation of the Italian monthly illustrated “Il mio Papa”.

Label

Panini sells and distributes its various titles (mainly US comics) in German-speaking countries under its own labels , with the series sometimes being classified under different labels:

Web links

Commons : Panini Group  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c paninigroup.com - history and background
  2. ^ A b M. Goldoni: The Panini family: The international success of the sticker from Modena and the establishment of a collector's picture museum. In: Working Group Image Printing Paper. Proceedings Modena 2010, Wachsam Verlag, Münster 2011, pp. 25–33.
  3. ↑ U Panini: MACHINE FOR PACKING SMALL PICTURES AND OTHER SHEET ELEMENTS INTO A SEALED ENVELOPE (in Italian or Serbian), patent specification IT4016076 or YU153077, filed June 20, 1977, published June 30, 1982.
  4. ↑ a b c Niklas Braband, Sonja Braband, Malte Braband: The secret of the Fifimatic. In: Young Science. No. 114, 2017, pp. 26–32.
  5. ↑ Holger Dambeck, Markus Dettmer: There are some missing. In: Der Spiegel . 25/2014, p. 78.
  6. ↑ Panini brings the first scrapbook to the Tour de France. In: radsport-news.com. April 25, 2019, accessed May 3, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Panini World Cup sticker: sample of millions shows massive unequal distribution. In: Spiegel online . June 19, 2014. Retrieved June 19, 2014.
  8. ↑ The 2018 World Cup collection
  9. ^ Prize winners of the LIMA
  10. ↑ Panini pictures soon from Stuttgart. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten . August 19, 2010.
  11. ↑ Michael Jacquemain, Thomas Jansen: New magazine Franziskus to leaf through - "My Pope" starts with 250,000 circulation. domradio.de, March 11, 2015, accessed on May 3, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Christian Meier: Papa ante Kiosk - For Catholics over 40 there is now “My Pope”. In: The world. March 13, 2015, accessed May 3, 2015 .
  13. ↑ www.paninis.eu - This is a pure information page about Panini albums and stickers and is in no way affiliated with Panini. Retrieved on November 17, 2018 (German).