Bloomsbury moves towards digital B2B after strong FY

Bloomsbury, the publisher behind the Harry Potter phenomenon, has turned in an overall strong set of full-year results and launched a 2020 strategy to move into digital B2B publishing.

It booked a full-year pretax profit of £10.36m, from a year-earlier profit of £9.60m, with revenue boosted by the boy-wizard factor to £123.73m, from £111.13m.

Final dividend was 5.34p a share, from 5.08p, taking the total to 6.4p, against 6.1p. Trading in the current financial year was in line with expectations.

The shares were down almost 3% as investors took profits and reacted to a corporate reorganisation, repositioning towards digital business-to-business (B2B) publishing and the new Bloomsbury 2020 strategy.

Chief executive Nigel Newton described the just-finished year as "very good," citing strong revenue and book-sales growth, including a significant rise in digital sales.

"In particular, our Children's & Educational division delivered an exceptional performance, with its third year of double-digit revenue growth," he said.

"Bloomsbury continues its strategy of growing academic, professional, special interest and educational revenues."

Newton said there were significant market opportunities to accelerate the growth of Bloomsbury's digital revenues, and today it set out the so-called Bloomsbury 2020 strategy.

"This focuses on growing revenues from academic and professional digital resources for academic libraries worldwide, whose budget is estimated to be $5bn.

"This will lead our repositioning in the market from a primarily consumer publisher to a digital B2B publisher, whilst continuing our long track record of huge best-sellers in the adult and children's markets which remain a very important part of Bloomsbury's mission."

The company added that it is reorganising into two divisions, from four, these being Consumer and Non-Consumer, reflecting the increasing emphasis on its Non-Consumer businesses.