Bloomsbury Regulatory News (BMY)

15 May 2009 07:00



Interim Management Statement

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc is issuing its Interim Management Statement in respect of the period from 1st January 2009 to date.

Specialist Publishing Division

The integration of the acquisitions made at the end 2008 is almost complete and the businesses are already benefiting from operating within the Group's infrastructure. The 2009 Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the 146th Edition, has just been published and is already selling ahead of expectations. Berg, the academic publisher, had a good start to the year and in particular its journals division selling 16 scholarly journals. The Arden Shakespeare list is now integrated in the US as well as the UK and Featherstone's sales have been good, particularly to local authorities. Overall, the division is performing well. 

Trade Publishing Division

The publishing programme for the Trade Division is second half weighted with major authors such as John Irving, Margaret Atwood, William Boyd, Heston Blumenthal and Ben Schott being published in the autumn. In the UK, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale won two awards at the British Book Awards, for Book of the Year and Best Non-Fiction book. Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows has been short listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Although we are experiencing slightly higher than expected returns of books from retailers, overall UK trading remains in line with our expectations. In Germany, the book market has cooled slightly and some titles are having difficulty achieving their sales targets. Berlin Verlag has, however, just released A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini in paperback and it has gone to number one on the German bestseller list. The US business, which last year experienced an improvement in profitability, is trading in line with budget. Rights deals continue to be a strong source of revenues.

We are continuing to focus on managing our cost base in the light of the current difficult economic environment and are investing carefully in our future publishing programme. We are also seeing an increasing number of company acquisition opportunities.

Financial Position

The risks and opportunities facing the company identified in the Outlook section of our preliminary statement of 31st March 2009 remain unaltered.

The Group's cash position at the end of March 2009 was £47.02m which was after the payment in March of royalties due to authors for the six months to 31st December 2008. 

-ends-

For further information, please contact:

Nigel Newton, Chief Executive, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 020 7494 6015

Daniel de Belder / Rosanne Perry, Bell Pottinger 020 7861 3232