Press releases & announcements

26th June 2003

AGM Statement

At today’s AGM of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Nigel Newton, Chairman will make the following statement:

“The current year has begun well and is in line with the Company’s recent trading statement. Acquisitions, new book launches and the continued development of our backlist are showing good progress.

In terms of acquisitions, we started off the year with the purchase of Andrew Brodie Publications, an educational publisher of photocopiable books for the UK schools market. In March, we acquired Berlin Verlag (“Berlin”), one of Germany’s leading literary publishers. This is our first move into the foreign language publishing market with the German market considered to be the second largest book market after the USA. The profile of Berlin has striking similarities to Bloomsbury, with its success built on identifying first time authors and developing them into bestsellers. A number of Berlin’s key authors such as Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer and David Guterson are also published by Bloomsbury in the English language. Since the acquisition, we have started a German language children’s list, with the first books to be published in the autumn of this year. The team at Berlin will be working closely with our children’s operation both in the UK and the US to develop a quality list in the German language market. The books will be published under the Bloomsbury children’s books imprint, a brand which enjoys worldwide recognition. Berlin is not expected to make a contribution in 2003. However, with investment in its future publishing programme and infrastructure, and full integration into the group to be complete by the end of this year, we expect it to make good contributions in the future.

Turning to new launches, 2003 got off to a strong start with the publication of Sophie Dahl’s, The Man with the Dancing Eye which went straight into the Sunday Times bestseller list. In April, we published The Summit of Everest to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. It is the first and only book to benefit from complete access to the Royal Geographical Society’s collection of photographs and documents. We have just published Margaret Atwood’s new novel, Oryx and Crake, which is already on the bestseller list. On June 21st we published the fifth in the series of Harry Potter books, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Sales of the new book have been considerable and, according to Nielsen BookScan, the independent book trade monitoring service, first day sales in the UK were 1,777,541 copies. The build up to the publication has already stimulated increased demand in the other four books in the series.

Increasing backlist revenues continues to be one of our core strategies for growth. Ben Schott’s, Schott’s Original Miscellany, which was one of our major revenue generators in 2002, was number one on the bestseller list for five straight months in 2003. The book will be published, by Bloomsbury USA, in the autumn, and a new book, Schott’s Food and Drink, will be published in the UK in the autumn. Paperbacks of our 2002 hardback bestsellers will be published in the next few months. Donna Tartt’s, The Little Friend, is due out in October 2003 and Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, which is due to be published in September, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.

The publishing programme across the group going forward is strong. We will continue to generate cash for future organic and acquisition growth and on the basis of the group’s performance to date we are confident that 2003 will be another good year.”

END

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