What the company does
Most people who know of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (LON:BMY), probably know it as the Harry Potter publisher.
It doesn’t shy from the soar-away success of JK Rowling’s boy wizard but to see Bloomsbury as a one franchise wonder is to miss the point.
Other major authors include Sarah J Maas, Lisa Taddeo and Lara Maiklem
To see it purely as a fiction publisher is also an error.
Top chef Tom Kerridge has been a huge seller for Bloomsbury in recent years, for instance.
It has two arms:
- Its consumer division consists of Adult and Children's trade publishing
- The non-consumer operation is made up of Academic & Professional, Special interest and content services.
How it is doing
In April, Bloomsbury snapped up certain assets of Red Globe Press (RGP), the academic imprint, from Macmillan Education Ltd for £3.7mln.
Bloomsbury said £2.1mln will be satisfied in cash at completion and up to £1.6mln will be paid on or post-completion, subject to the assignment of certain contracts.
RGP specialises in high-quality publishing for Higher Education students globally in Humanities and Social Sciences, Business and Management, and Study Skills. It has a backlist of more than 7,000 titles and publishes more than 100 new titles per year, with content including digital platforms, textbooks, research-driven materials and general academic publishing.
Bloomsbury emerged as a winner of the COVID-19 pandemic as homebound people turned to books to escape or cope with reality.
Chief executive Nigel Newton told Proactive he was “surprised and thrilled” by how the first-half results turned out, despite the initial worries when lockdown was first announced.
All of Bloomsbury’s retail partners shut down in March, however by June people were nonetheless buying books “in quite a big way”, Newton said.
“It soon became apparent that we were not only hanging in there, but that we were doing better than we had done in a very good period this time years ago.”
Escapist titles, psychology and cookery books were most in-demand among hundreds of thousands sitting at home.
Readers immersed themselves in the Greek island of Hydra with Leonard Cohen in Polly Samson’s “A Theatre for Dreamers”, or learnt that people may just be fundamentally good in “Humankind” History by Rutger Bregman.
Profit before tax climbed 60% to £4mln and revenue up 10% to £78.3mln in the six months to the end of August, which were its highest first-half earnings since 2008.
At period-end, net cash nearly doubled to £44mln compared to 2019, and the publisher recommended the resumption of dividends starting with an interim payout of 1.28p.
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What the broker says: Investec
“Despite early investor concerns over the impact of COVID-19 on demand, and Bloomsbury’s ability to fulfil it, the group’s performance continues to confound these fears, helped by management’s continued focus on operational execution,” analysts at Investec noted.
“Macro-economic challenges clearly remain, but we continue to expect Bloomsbury to emerge robustly from the crisis and that its resilient growth will gain greater recognition over time.”