Heading for an international billion

Ravensburger is advancing its international expansion on several fronts. The games and publishing group based in rural Upper Swabia is strengthening its U. S. business, has widened its executive structure to reflect a more international footprint and in 2026 took a majority stake in the leading Swiss children’s publisher NordSüd. Along with others, these moves describe a strategy that goes well beyond the reach of a German family-owned publisher — and that may quietly accelerate the unwinding of the long-established territory- and language-based licensing model in publishing.

This is part of a series on internationalization of German language publishers. Former contributions include:

„Für jeden Markt und jede Community die richtigen Stoffe finden“  |  Matthias Mundt on Lübbe Audio

„Internationalisierung beginnt bei uns mit der Definition des Markenkerns“ |  Carsten Schwarz on Kiddinx

„Wir übersetzen Klang“ |  Eduardo García on “Atmende Bücher”

„Kulturelle Anschlussfähigkeit schaffen, ohne in Beliebigkeit zu verfallen“ |  Marc Sieper on Audio-to-Go

„Internationalisierung bedeutet für uns Skalierbarkeit ohne kulturellen Verlust“ |  Ines Zimzinski über Die Höragenten

“Understand the audience first, and only then decide which titles to introduce” |  Publishing consultant Carlo Carrenho on internationalizing audiobook business

Earlier in 2026, Ravensburger Verlag GmbH announced that it had acquired the majority of shares in NordSüd Verlag AG from Hamburg-based W1-Verlage GmbH. NordSüd, founded in 1961 and headquartered in Zurich, is Switzerland’s largest children’s book publisher and, according to the German publishing news outlet Börsenblatt, it sits among the ten largest German-language publishers in the picture-book segment. Its catalogue includes some of the world’s most widely translated picture-book classics — Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish, Hans de Beer’s Lars, the Little Polar Bear and Torben Kuhlmann’s mouse adventures.

The ownership shift is more granular than a clean takeover. W1-Verlage previously held 90 percent of NordSüd; W1 owner Jan Weitendorf von Hacht has now sold 60 percent to Ravensburger, with W1-Verlage and minority shareholder Urs Wetli remaining on the cap table. Financial terms were not disclosed. NordSüd will continue to operate independently from Zurich under its existing management, co-CEOs Herwig Bitsche and Nina Grünberger.

Crucially for the strategic logic of the deal, NordSüd is also the parent of NorthSouth Books, the U. S. picture-book imprint. Weitendorf von Hacht said he had been looking for a strong partner to develop NordSüd jointly:

“Ravensburger has an advantage over other potential buyers in that the partnership opens up additional forms of exploitation and distribution opportunities. These opportunities are of greater strategic importance to us than holding a majority stake.”

For Ravensburger, the rationale is dual: build out the children’s book segment and bring in NordSüd’s existing U. S. business as a learning opportunity. Dr Anuschka Albertz, Group Managing Director Books+ at Ravensburger, described the two programmes as complementary and emphasised partnership on equal footing.

The NordSüd move lands in a year of recalibration. After two years of double-digit growth, group revenue declined by 5.9 percent (4.8 percent currency-adjusted) to USD 875 million in financial year 2025, with the trading-card segment normalising after the explosive launch of Disney Lorcana. The core business of games, puzzles and books grew by three percent.

What stands out, however, is the regional mix. Ravensburger now generates around 70 percent of its sales abroad, with close to 40 percent of that coming from North America. Sales board member Susanne Knoche reported that despite new tariff conditions, the group’s core business in the U. S. and Canada grew by 11 percent in 2025 and even more strongly in Eastern European countries — a clear outperformance versus the rest of the portfolio.

That tilt is mirrored in management. As of 1 January 2025, Ravensburger expanded its previously two-person executive board to four. Knoche took over as Chief Sales Officer, having been with the company since 2001. Filip Francke, who had run the group’s largest category, Games, from Seattle, was appointed Chief Product Officer. The company’s own management page lists Francke as based in Ravensburg and Seattle — an unusually direct signal that international product strategy is now anchored on both sides of the Atlantic. CFO Hanspeter Mürle also took on the COO role for supply chain and operational processes.

Ravensburger’s American presence is not new. The group acquired Wonder Forge in 2012 and Swedish toy maker BRIO in 2015, and in September 2017 it bought ThinkFun, joining all three under the newly established Ravensburger North America division. ThinkFun, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is the developer of logic and STEM (MINT) titles such as Rush Hour. Subsequent moves into China and Poland with own subsidiaries extended the pattern of operating directly rather than purely through external licensees.

Read in that light, NordSüd is less an opportunistic bolt-on than the latest piece of a decade-long puzzle. NorthSouth Books extends the group’s English-language reach into picture books — a category where Ravensburger’s existing U. S. operation had focused mainly on games, puzzles and toys.

International book licensing has long relied on a system of neatly divided territories and languages: a Swiss or German publisher would license rights market by market, with local partners handling translation, production, distribution and marketing under separate contracts. That model still works, but it is increasingly under pressure from publishers seeking scale, cross-border brand-building and tighter control of rights, sales and marketing data.

By taking majority control of a house that already owns its own U. S. imprint, Ravensburger sidesteps part of that traditional architecture. The same intellectual property – Pfister’s rainbow-scaled fish, Kuhlmann’s mice — can in principle be steered through an integrated commercial system spanning books, games, brands and channels, rather than relicensed in fragments. Add to this the opportunities de-centralized print on demand allows for, and you’ll see the big picture of total global control over a publisher’s IP.

The remaining minority stakes for W1-Verlage and Urs Wetli, plus the unchanged Zurich base, signal that the integration is meant to be operational and strategic rather than a hard restructuring.

It is also consistent with how Ravensburger has set up its board: international product development, sales and category leadership are now anchored at group level, with one CPO running the global product portfolio from a German-American base. The licensing model is not being abolished, but its centre of gravity inside the group is shifting from country-by-country deals to coordinated multi-format brand strategy.

Whether NordSüd can keep its independent voice while benefiting from Ravensburger’s distribution and infrastructure is the question that will define the next few years. The stated promise on both sides is operational autonomy with strategic alignment. If it works, the deal will be remembered less as a single Swiss-German transaction than as a marker of how mid-sized European publishing groups are quietly preparing for a market in which old territorial boundaries matter less than global reach and operational control.

We’ve seen this working the other way round for decades. That a Europe-based publisher takes the reverse step across the Atlantic to gain a safe foothold in a promising market as yet dominated by print is a novel experience.