Bloomsbury – Trading ahead of expectations

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (LSE: BMY), the leading independent publisher, today gives a pre-year end trading update for the 12 months ending 28 February 2022.

Bloomsbury is pleased to announce that revenue is expected to be comfortably ahead and profit materially ahead of market expectations* for the year ending 28 February 2022. 

Trading continued to be strong in the Consumer division, for both Adult and Children’s publishing.

A major milestone has been hit by Bloomsbury Digital Resources (“BDR”). We are delighted to announce that on 18 January 2022, we achieved the goal announced in May 2016 that we would create the BDR division which would generate £15 million of sales and £5 million of profit by the year ending 28 February 2022. Six years later we have done exactly that. Achieving this key long-term strategic goal, building high margin, quality revenues, demonstrates the strength and successful execution of our digital strategy.

BDR will benefit from the addition of further digital resources from the acquisition of ABC-CLIO LLC (“ABC-CLIO”). As previously announced, Bloomsbury completed the purchase of ABC-CLIO on 16 December 2021, for £17.3 million in cash. ABC-CLIO is an established academic publisher of reference, nonfiction, online curriculum and professional development materials in both print and digital formats for schools, academic libraries and public libraries, primarily in the USA. This acquisition is an excellent strategic fit with BDR and significantly accelerates the growth of Bloomsbury’s academic publishing in North America.

We will provide an update with our preliminary results in May 2022.

* The Board considers that the consensus market expectation for the year ending 28 February 2022 is currently revenue of £197.1 million and profit before taxation and highlighted items of £2