The carousel of IPOs continues to spin.

The Bertelsmann group wants to bring part of its service division onto the floor.

The company Majorel, in which the group has a 50% stake, announced in Luxembourg on Tuesday that it was aiming for a listing on the Amsterdam stock exchange in the second half of the year.

Bertelsmann will remain a strategic shareholder of Majorel even after the private placement, together with partner Saham, who holds the other half in Majorel, said Bertelsmann boss Thomas Rabe

Majorel was created at the beginning of 2019 as part of a partnership between Bertelsmann and Saham, which merged some business areas to build a leading provider of customer service.

Majorel's business purpose is to optimize the relationships between a company and its customers, also by means of technical solutions, for example by partially replacing call center interactions with automated processes.

Majorel is active in around 30 countries with more than 60,000 employees.

According to the information, global technology companies are among the more than 400 customers.

According to the Bertelsmann balance sheet, sales in 2019 amounted to 1.2 billion euros and grew to around 1.38 billion euros in 2020.

According to Rabe, it rose by 35 percent in the first half of this year.

The Arvato service division, which also includes Majorel, is an important pillar in Bertelsmann's balance sheet.

In 2020, Arvato was the second largest division with sales of around 4.4 billion euros.

Only the TV business of the RTL Group is bigger at around 6 billion euros.

In third place is the book division Penguin Random House (3.8 billion euros).

Bertelsmann is currently driving forward many changes.

Within the RTL Group, larger units are to be created in order to be able to better compete with streaming providers such as Netflix and Amazon.

In Germany, RTL will therefore buy the magazine business from Gruner + Jahr (“Stern”, “Geo”).

Babbel is also coming in 2021

The Berlin language learning provider Babbel is also expected to go public in 2021. The operator Lesson Line announced this on Tuesday. The aim is to raise at least 180 million euros. Observers estimate that the company, which was founded in 2007, could be valued at more than one billion euros. The competitor Duolingo, which has around 40 million active users per month, made a brilliant stock market debut on Wall Street in July and was valued at 6.5 billion dollars.

Under the brand "Babbel" - derived from the Hessian dialect word for speak - the company offers language courses, vocabulary and spelling tests in 15 languages ​​in its app on a subscription basis. In addition, Babbel has already invested in a language travel platform and new learning methods such as podcasts and live tutoring classes by native speakers. The company intends to use the proceeds from the IPO to further expand its offering. “We also see great potential in corporate banking. We also want to continue expanding in the USA. We are one of the few startups from Germany that is successful there, ”said company boss Arne Schepker of the Reuters news agency.