Regulatory announcements

Bloomsbury Publishing is issuing its Interim Management Statement in respect of the period 1 March 2014 to date.

In the three months ended 31 May 2014, revenues are up year on year in our Academic & Professional and Children’s & Educational divisions but down in our Adult division, as anticipated, following the exceptional success of certain books in that division last year. Total revenues were down by 9% on last year (when they were up by 19% year on year), but are up by 7% when compared to the three months ended 31 May 2012. Digital sales were 12% of total revenue compared to 11% in the same period last year. Rights and services revenues were up by 2% in the period. This quarter traditionally generates the smallest profit in our financial year.

In May, the Academic & Professional division was voted Academic, Educational and Professional Publisher of the Year at the industry trade awards for the second year running. The judges said that the division stands apart for ‘the scale and range of its ambition’ and ‘it leads from the front in re-imagining the way content can be used and sold’. Bloomsbury Collections, which delivers online collections of scholarly e-books for the library market, will be fully launched in September. This service enables scholars and students to use the full range of Bloomsbury’s academic publishing portfolio. The site has soft launched with 1,300 books in 12 subject areas, bringing together innovative current research publications alongside more than a century of authoritative scholarship from the backlists of imprints such as T&T Clark, Bristol Classical Press, Continuum, Berg and the Arden Shakespeare. We expect 3,000 titles to be on the platform by February 2015. 

In the Adult division our best-selling titles were Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 2014, A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre and in the US, Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? which has been at number one on the New York Times graphic novel best-seller list for six weeks.

In the Children’s & Educational division, best-selling titles include the Harry Potter Box Set by J.K. Rowlingand Paper Towns by John Green, with the film rights being sold to Fox 2000 for release next year. William Sutcliffe's The Wall was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Time for Bed, Fred! by Yasmeen Ismail won the V&A Book Illustration Award 2014.
In the Information division, the official launch of the IZA World of Labor http://wol.iza.org online information resource took place on 1 May in Washington D.C. The site has been accessed from over 110 countries. In June our management services agreement with the Qatar Foundation for its book publishing business was extended on the same terms to December 2015, and the intention of the parties is to enter into a longer term renewal by June 2015.

At 30 June 2014 the Group had net cash of £2.9 million (30 June 2013: £8.5 million). The final instalments for the acquisitions of Fairchild Books and Applied Visual Arts Publishing, totalling £1.9 million, were paid in this period and £6.7 million for the acquisition of Hart Publishing was paid over the last year.

In response to the evolving digital marketplace the development of online knowledge hubs is now a core part of our business. In the light of this, our investment in online platforms, which was previously relatively small, has been increasing. We have therefore decided to change the treatment in our financial statements of the amortisation of product and systems development assets, our internally generated intangibles. Previously this amortisation was included within highlighted items, we now intend to include it within profit before taxation and highlighted items. The change has no effect on profit before taxation or cash. The results for the year ended 28 February 2014 will be restated accordingly, with profit before taxation and highlighted items reducing by £1.0 million (2012/13: £0.7 million).

Nigel Newton commented: "We continue to develop Bloomsbury as a wholly integrated trade and academic publisher. This is traditionally a quiet quarter for us. We remain well positioned to benefit from a strong publishing programme, including powerful new titles from Margaret Atwood, Paul Hollywood and Tom Kerridge later this year.”

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