Hachette's parent company, Lagardère Publishing, reported first-half 2026 revenue of €1,343 million on a July 28 earnings call, with company officials calling it "a solid first half" despite what they described as challenging market conditions (Publishing Perspectives).

The revenue figure represents a slight dip — down 0.4% on a reported basis — but rose 1.3% on a like-for-like basis, which strips out currency swings and acquisitions to compare existing operations. The gap between the two numbers came down to a €38 million negative currency effect: the U.S. dollar and the British pound both weakened against the euro, shrinking the value of Hachette's English-language sales when converted back to the company's reporting currency.

Lagardère Publishing sits inside the larger Louis Hachette Group, chaired by Jean-Christophe Thierry, with Grégoire Castaing as Deputy CEO. David Shelley serves as CEO of both Hachette Book Group in the United States and Hachette UK. The wider Lagardère group — which includes publishing alongside other businesses — brought in €4,436 million for the first half, up 2.0% as reported and 2.7% like-for-like (Lagardère press release). Louis Hachette Group's first-half revenue came to approximately €4.5 billion, with EBITDA rising to €218 million (Investing.com).

The picture varied sharply by market. In France, Hachette's home territory, revenue contracted 1.6% year-on-year. The U.K. was down 1.2%. But Hachette Book Group in the United States grew 1.3%, and Hachette's Spain and Latin America operations posted gains. Digital audio revenue in France — audiobooks and related downloads — grew more than 20% year-on-year, a bright spot in an otherwise flat European market.

A separate thread drew attention on the call: Hachette is in line to receive a substantial windfall from the recently approved Anthropic settlement in the United States. The settlement relates to the AI company's use of copyrighted material — the kind of books Hachette publishes — and the payout, confirmed by executives on July 28, adds a one-off boost to the publisher's finances. No figure was specified in the earnings call discussion.

For the second half of 2026, Hachette's release schedule includes Joe Biden's memoir and new books by Min Jin Lee, Elin Hilderbrand, James Patterson and Malcolm Gladwell. Those names span literary fiction, summer blockbuster novels and blockbuster-level non-fiction — a list designed to move hardback copies through the autumn and holiday shopping seasons.

What makes this report notable is the combination: a publisher holding roughly steady in a soft market, with a legal settlement cheque on the way and a heavyweight autumn catalogue lined up behind it. For readers, the chain from manuscript to shelf depends on exactly this arithmetic — enough revenue to keep imprints buying books, enough cash to print them, and enough big names to bring buyers into shops.