Hearst Magazines International (A)

In 1989, George Green took over as the first head of Hearst Magazines International (HMI), a division founded to spearhead the Hearst publishing empire’s forays outside the United States. Green started with a slim list of international titles, but under his direction HMI had expanded to 156 editions in 36 languages, distributed in over 100 countries. In 2007, annual earnings for the division were up 37 percent over the prior year and the division reported a cumulative annual growth rate of 30 percent over the five previous years. Green expected international to soon provide half of Hearst’s corporate earnings – a considerable achievement for a division that had included not much more than a few Spanish language editions of Cosmopolitan a decade and half earlier. Cosmopolitan led the international list as Hearst’s most successful magazine with 60 editions. Cosmo, as it was familiarly known, was aimed at independent women in their 20s and at advertisers marketing products and brands to