Spanish Planeta Group Installs in Morocco

The Spanish group Planeta, one of the world’s leaders in publishing and higher education, has decided to open in Rabat, Morocco’s capital city, two schools for students wishing to be trained in the fields of business and tourism.
The announcement was made Thursday by the group’s chairman Jose Manuel Garcia. The two schools, to open doors in 2018, are first of their kind by Grup Planeta in the African continent.
The Spanish group also intends to enroll in its global project foreign students with 50 pc of the seats devoted to applicants from Africa and the Arab world.
Spanish ambassador to Morocco Ricardo Diez-Hochleitner Rodriguez stressed the importance of this project in enhancing further Moroccan-Spanish relations and congratulated Planeta group for its choice of the North African kingdom, offering huge business opportunities in a wide variety of sectors.
The Planeta group say that its graduates will be recognized by the Moroccan State and Overseas. Based in Barcelona, this Spanish family owned group operates in Spain, Portugal, France and Latin America.
It was founded in 1949 by José Lara Hernandez. Planeta owns over 70 publishing houses worldwide. It publishes the newspaper La Razón. Besides publishing, the group operates in the areas of collectibles, training, direct marketing, distance learning, and audiovisual media.
Planeta is continuing to expand, with an emphasis on reading groups, international partnerships, and digital, with the creation of e-book distribution platform Libranda.
It is present in 25 countries, with more than 100 imprints and a catalogue of 15,000 titles. After purchasing Editis, the second largest publishing group of France, Planeta acquired a 50 percent stake in Spain’s largest reading community, Circulo de lectores, from Bertelsmann’s Direct group. Circulo de lectores is the world’s second-largest reading group, with one million subscribers and revenues of 120 million EUR.
Besides book publishing, the group has shares in Grupo AtresMedia (former Grupo Antena 3), which includes the television channels Antena 3, Neox, Nova and Nitro, and radio stations Onda Cero, Europa FM and Onda Melodía.