Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (BMY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Bloomsbury Publishing plc investor presentation. Throughout the [quarterly] presentation, listeners will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses when it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to note the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Nigel Newton, CEO. Good morning, sir.

Good morning to you, and good morning to all of you, and thank you very much indeed for being with us this afternoon. I'm delighted also to welcome my co-presenters of Penny Scott-Bayfield, Group Finance Director of Bloomsbury Publishing; and Tamsin Guaranty, a new role of Head of Investor Relations. So I'm sure the fact that you're sitting here is living proof of her making it all happen. Oops. And there we go. So we're going to start now with the first slide, if I may have it, please. So you all saw the fantastic results that we announced 2 weeks ago now. And our key message here has been the success of our strategy, no doubt very like your own, of having a portfolio of portfolios so that we're hedging the volatile consumer markets against the steadier academic market on the one hand and the booming conditions in America against the more constrained economic conditions of some other countries and by subject area. So the portfolio of portfolios has done us proud as the Consumer division has taken up the charge led in recent years by the Academic or nonconsumer division, 30% sales growth and 57% profit growth, good dividend increase, growth in Bloomsbury Digital Resources, the flywheel effects. Next slide, please. So I would particularly draw your attention to the top-right tablet there, a margin of 14.2%, which is fantastic and has been one of our goals. And if you look on the right, you'll see 3 of the books that we did it with. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell was voted Book of the Year, and she was voted Author of the Year. So that's our great, new fantasy success and a genre that's doing very well for us, Sarah J. Masa, of which more in a minute, and Peter Frankopan's [Majesterial] History of Climate, The Earth Transformed. Next slide, please.

So good afternoon, everyone. I'm here to take you through the financial highlights. So Nigel has talked about our 30% increase in revenue. He's also mentioned our 57% increase on profits. And as he's been saying in some of the other meetings, if we've got something good to say, we're going to be saying it's at least 3 times. Obviously, the impact of that on our diluted EPS was for that to come up by 53%, so we're really delighted with that result, and then, as you mentioned already, a 25% increase in our full year dividend. So we hope that, for those of you who are shareholders, that that's a very -- a way of rewarding you and thanking you for your support. We'd also call your attention out to the net cash position, which is just over 6 -- just under GBP 66 million. And obviously that gives us a huge power, which, as some of you will know, that just after these results were announced, in fact, 3 days later, 3 working days later, we announced a really significant acquisition to use that for our power to generate further growth through M&A. And we'll talk through that further in the Q&A session afterwards. So if we move on to the next slide where we highlight our revenue, here what we're doing is taking you through the revenue by channel. So you can see we're platform-agnostic. We create great content, and then our aim is to get it out into whatever format the customer, whether they be an enormous academic institution or an individual, whatever format best suits them. So you can [hear] that extraordinary resilience and, in fact, gross of print up 32%, and that's been very much focused on the Consumer side of the business. Within Academic, the trend that we forecast many, many years ago, which was that the academic market would move away from print and to digital, has absolutely played out this year. And that's been part of what's driven this extraordinary 47% growth in e-books as well as further growth in [indiscernible] digital resources. We've also seen a 50% growth in Audio, and that's really exciting. I think it's still a small market at the moment, but with the entry of Spotify coming in, we see great potential for further growth there. And it's exciting because that tends to be additive. People will buy an audio book as well as another type of it rather than switching to. So a really interesting and very positive outlook there. So if we move on to the next slide, which provides an update on the strength of our balance sheet, so as many of you know, our strong balance sheet has been a really important factor in our success, both providing firepower when we have the opportunities and great resilience when things have been tougher, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic. So here, again, I'd call out the attention to the net cash adjustment the GBP 66 million. We remain highly cash generative, and that's through our operations. But that's also how we're leveraging what we do. And within that, you can see, on the right-hand side there, we've reduced the cash tied up with stock by 26%. So that's created GBP 10 million of cash that we can then use to fund growth. And that's come about from being smarter about our production and also benefiting slightly from the fact that the supply chains, certainly over last year, were under less cash than they've been certainly during the pandemic. So a combination of being very agile about where we print, being smarter about it with Academic. We now need to print less. It means that that creates a real tangible opportunity. So if we move on to the cash flow, Tamsin will take us through the highlights here.

Excellent. So I think one of the big highlights here is our cash flow generated from operations nearing GBP 49 million, so extremely strong, as Penny has suggested. So I think, looking over to where we have spent that money, GBP 11 million of that, or just over, has gone into rewarding shareholders with dividend payments. So taking us to our next slide, which is one of the Board's favorite slides, so our full year dividend increased by 25% this year, reflecting the exceptional operational performance, but also the prioritization of our shareholders. So 14.69p of dividend, 25% growth, so very, very strong growth. And we continue with, even post-acquisition, a fairly conservative balance sheet. And we'll continue to focus on returns to shareholders and rewarding our shareholders and maintaining growth of dividend, a very conservative balance sheet and strong cash and earnings cover. So onto our investment case. So many of you will be very familiar with our investment case. And as Nigel has talked about, we are very focused on our portfolio of portfolio, so that unique portfolio that we have of consumer and academic publishing. We've had really strong performance over the last few years from our Academic business, and then, this year, an exceptional performance from our Consumer business, which demonstrates that balance and the protection of [indiscernible] from either of those markets. So that successful diversified strategy, not only between the business areas but also across channels, markets and territories, and that's a really important part of our strategy. So that's delivered 222% growth in adjusted earnings per share over the last 5 years to '24, so really strong earnings growth. And as we've walked through, progressive dividend policy and rewarding shareholders as a result of that. So then turning to a key pillar of our strategy, which here we talked about at the results, but have actually delivered, as Penny suggested, 3 days after our end-of-year results. So acquisitions remain a key pillar of our strategy. We use our strong financial position to augment our growth through acquisitions. We gained scale through selective strategic acquisitions, mainly in the Academic, mainly in Digital and mainly in the U.S. And that's exactly what we've delivered upon with the recent acquisition of Rowman & Littlefield. So now we've made 34 acquisitions since the inception of the company for over the 37 years, which is a really strong level of acquisitions. And we'll talk through what that gives us in terms of that experience of integration as we progress through the Rowman & Littlefield acquisition. And then looking at our diversified strategy, again, we'll see everything 3 times. So our channels, our territories and our markets, so this is very key as to how we view our business and how we plan going forward. So in channels, this is really formats and what we -- what's key to understanding is that we are completely platform-agnostic. So we will meet our customer, whether they be Consumer or Academic, using whichever format may suit that customer. So digital products, print, whether that be hard or paper back, e-books, audio, video, we have the -- every platform covered and easy, complementary customer access. And we are always working on our technology backbone. So the channel is an important part to understand that we are truly platform-agnostic. And then in territories, we're very proud to say 77% of revenue is now international, really strong growth from the U.S. and that we are expanding, as you've already seen, post year-end in the U.S. market. And in terms of markets, we are fairly unique in our complementary academic and consumer publishing, and that does really provide a key base for our portfolio of portfolios. So many of you are managing your own portfolio. We are diversified. And I think that's a key part of understanding our strategy so that we aren't exposed mainly to Academic or mainly to Consumer or one particular market, but are truly international and diversified.

So we saw exceptional upside in the Consumer area, as you've gathered, this time with 49% revenue growth in that area and 108% profit growth. In the bottom bullets there, you'll see Consumer profit margin increased to 15% from 11%. So that's really a key figure for us. And let's take a look at the next slide and how we did it. Well, there's one answer. So Sarah Maas is now a global brand. You can see the 3 different series of her books that we publish in the middle, Throne of Glass and [Black] and then A Court of Thorns and Roses and then Crescent City by Sarah J. Maas. So -- and it was in that last series that January's new publication came out, House of Flame and Shadow. We're very lucky that we had to deal with one of these taking-off global brands before in the form of Harry Potter in the years 1997 to 2007. Believe it or not, we have a number of veterans of that period, not just me, but also Kathleen Farrar, our Sales and Marketing Director. They're very complicated to manage because the whole world is trying to get a piece of these star authors in the form of interviews and wanting them for events, speeches, signing sessions, you name it, as well as a real urgency to know what happens in the plot of the latest book. Next slide, please. So there's some of our experience in building best sellers. So Sarah Maas is now 16 different books. That strong backlist has been a key driver in these numbers as fans new to her read through the whole of the 3 series. She's been described as the Taylor Swift of Publishing, and we'll go with that. And her books were described in Forbes Magazine as the best-selling books of the beginning of the year. So these are all part of a wider genre of science fiction and fantasy which you can see have grown considerably. Samantha Shannon is another one of our star fantasy writers. We signed her up when she was still an undergraduate at Oxford, and she's gone from strength to strength. Cixin Liu, our Beijing-based best-selling science fiction author, had, as you well know, a Netflix streaming series, I think an 8-parter that launched on March the 23, so after the financial period we are reporting to you on. And boy has it become big since then. It was already big. But there's no power like the power of Netflix for widening an audience. And we're very lucky to own Head of Zeus, the publishing [imprints] we bought 3 years ago or so that brought us this book. Next slide, please. So there you see the sheer range of our list. Right-hand side, middle row, Poppy Cooks, The Actually Delicious Air Fryer Cookbook, what a success that's been. And a number of other big books in the [indiscernible] fiction side Patchett by -- sorry, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett has been a huge global success. And up on the top left, I've already mentioned Impossible Creatures, but I haven't mentioned Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, one of the great love stories [indiscernible] fiction during the time of the troubles in Belfast, huge success. Next slide, please. Non-consumer, so we went backwards in Non-consumer. What happened? Well, first of all, it's off a very high comparative figure. Sales have been up 28% in the previous year. Secondly, there are always swings and roundabouts. And in this case, one of them was that the U.S. government ended the COVID funding it was giving to universities, much of which was being channeled into being able to teach people remotely working at home during lockdowns from which we were prime beneficiaries during the lockdowns with BDR, Bloomsbury Digital Resources. So this is more steady-state. But just to explain to you our confidence in the area expressed since these results in the $83 million acquisition of the great independent American academic publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, are these World Bank statistics in the third tablet down there? So 380 million higher education students by the year 2030 compared to 220 million 3 years ago. That's a pretty dramatic increase in an addressable market. No, they're not in the U.K. They're not in Italy. They're in India and China and markets in the Far East, where Bloomsbury are well represented in terms of our sales force. Next slide, please. So there is Bloomsbury Digital Resources. As you can see, revenue growth in the period, more projected subscriptions, or 50% annual subscriptions. The Holy Grail or something we seek actively and -- look at in the bottom tablet at the room we've got to go. So we've not only sold to 2,800 ARLs, academic research libraries, but there are 5,000 of them worldwide. So we've got another 2,200 to go, and that just represents future upside. No doubt they'll be the more difficult ones to persuade as we will have started with the low-hanging fruit. But we've got the products. Everybody wants [Strana] online. And cleverly, with the acquisition of ABC-CLIO, we've added the U.S. high school market, 27,000 of them. We've so far hit 4,600, so much to go. Next slide, please. Special Interest, well, great to see that up 6% to GBP 22.9 million in profit, about steady. We've won some great prices for our specialist publishing in nature, sports, sailing, military history, bicycling and so on. Next slide, please.

And then looking to our long-term growth strategy and goals, we reiterate much of our strategy. And when we've been looking, as Nigel will talk to a bit later about our 2030 goals, we have expanded slightly, but our main strategy remains very successful. And so we are expanding more, better and faster rather than any form of change, so please don't be concerned. In terms of our main focus, it remains discover, nurture and champion our high-quality authors. They are the lifeblood of our business, and we remain focused on using new ways to leverage our existing title rights. So I think now we're actually up to a new count today as the base Bloomsbury business, over 84,000 entitles. And then we've added to that 40,000 of the Rowman & Littlefield titles. So we are expanding all of the time. And we delivered, in terms of the Consumer business, 49% growth in our Consumer revenue with a really broad base of bestsellers. Now, we would really like to highlight that this was an exceptional year with 161% growth in the revenue from Sarah J. Maas, but also that breadth, both in terms of critical and commercial acclaim that we have had over the past year. So very broad-based success. And then looking to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, we've had continued success 26 years after first publication, nearly 27 now. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was the #1 bestselling book again, so within its genre, #1 bestseller. And the Harry Porter Wizarding Almanac was also #1 in the Sunday Times and New York Times Best Seller Lists last year. So very broad-based success. Then looking towards our international parts of the business, so overseas revenue, 77%, and U.S. revenues increased to 56% of group revenue. And with the recent acquisition, we will see how that develops over the coming year. And then some highlights of Non-consumer, very strong growth over the years from BDR. So GBP 26.6 million of turnover, but that is 322% growth since 2018, 2019. Bloomsbury's team deserves huge credit for having built this business from scratch. That's a completely organic business that will be built up through the gaming and cross-selling from our acquisitions. But that was us recognizing the shift to digital and building that business. And then highlights within sustainability, we are continually winning prices. Even this week, we won another one. So we've been winner of the IPG Sustainability Award, LBF Sustainability Initiative Award. We are continually winning prizes in this area and the exact opposite of [indiscernible] we are making huge strides, a 77% reduction in scope voluntary emissions over 4 years. And if any of you are thrilled by this, you can read about 40 pages that I've written about this in our annual report, which will be published soon. And then huge strides in our employee experience and engagement. So diversity, equity, inclusion we've made huge strides in over the last year, and we have a lot of plans coming out through the coming year. Now we have appointed a new Head of People and Engagement. So we are making huge strides. We won the Small-Cap Diversity, Inclusivity and Engagement Award. And we have made a lot of progress in terms of our writers' diversity as well, and you can see that there in the bottom tablet. I'll hand over to Nigel to explain Bloomsbury 2030.

So thank you very much, Tamsin. So Bloomsbury 2030 was announced on our results day. It's not a strategy. It's a vision. And we had some shareholders do a presentation at Bishopsgate that evening and explained -- I was struck by the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson when I was raising the original venture capital to start Bloomsbury in 1986. And one potential venture capital backer said, "Don't tell me the problems you foresee. Tell me your dreams." And I thought that was a good comment because he was kind of accepting that things might go wrong, as they often do at start-ups, for the market to know how would it look if it went really, really well, which, knock on wood, it has done. So I wanted to apply the same to the next 6 years. And we said verbally, but would never say in print, that my dream anyway is to get to GBP 500 million of sales, up from the present GBP 343 million, as soon as possible. But am I saying we'll do that by 2030? No, because it would be a fool's game to make a public prediction. So I'm just telling you my dream for the simple -- and that of the whole team at Bloomsbury for the simple reason of communicating to you the ambition that we have for the future of this company and especially at this moment of so much forward momentum. So how are we going to do it? Through expanding our portfolio. Of course, when we wrote these slides, the Rowman & Littlefield acquisition hadn't happened. It happened the following week. But of course, we hoped that it might, and it's a very great addition to our portfolio,-in filling areas we're already in and making us considerably stronger. So our digital resources go from, in some cases, nice-to-have content to must-have content. A big focus, as no doubt has been true in many of your own organizations, since March 2020 and the pandemic has been on our people. And we've had nothing short of a people revolution at Bloomsbury as we've treated our own staff as our most valuable assets and have shown great flexibility in new ways of working, which are working very well in book publishing generally. So that's just one aspect of it. But the secret of Bloomsbury remains the combination of academic publishing with general publishing. Nobody else does that. Don't ask me why 5 of the 7 activities of book publishing, legal rights, contracts, finance, production, are the same, whatever kind of book you're producing. And the value-added difference is just in editorial or book commissioning on one hand and marketing on the other. So the synergies in those 5 areas and cost savings from doing them together as opposed to the different bits in the other 2 parts are considerable. And moreover, it gives us a great financial year. So we have the -- we have the summer reading boom for paperbacks in Consumer Books in July and August. We have the Back to University College/High School in September -- August, September, October. Then going back to the general side, we have the Christmas reading boom of November, December, followed by the end of the financial year scooping up money from university budgets before it's taken back if it's not spent on digital resources, and the same again in June with the end of the academic year. And in January, of course, we have the new year, new you boom in sales of diet books, cookery books, exercise books, well-being books. So we kind of have the perfect balanced year. And so developing that further is one of the big goals of Bloomsbury 2030. Next slide, please. So there is the summary. I'll concentrate on the right-hand bullet about trading being ahead. Why did we have the confidence to make a small upgrade so early in the financial year? Well, for a very good reason. The momentum of the year to the end, February, that we're reporting on to you has continued unabated and we had a great March, a great April, and now we know a great May. So that's why we made that change. And of course, it was all followed by the acquisition of Rowman & Littlefield, something we've wanted to do for many years. And in the end, we only bought the good books. Well, I'm sure it's all good, but the books we wanted, the academic parts, and we left behind the warehouse, and, frankly, the company itself, we just bought the assets and 163 people who are moving over to us. They're based in Maryland, a new place for us. So that's the story. And Penny would be pleased to answer difficult questions, and I would be pleased to answer easy questions. Over to you.

Perfect. Nigel, Penny, Tamsin, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue submit your questions [Operator Instructions]. But just while the company takes a few moments to read those questions that have been submitted today, I'd like to remind you a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions, both pre-submitted and throughout today's live presentation. And Penny, at this point, if I could hand over to you to just to read out the questions and share the Q&A, that would be great, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Thank you. So I think one thing that's come up in several of the questions has been to talk a bit more about the acquisition, so how we funded it, what that means for BDR, where we intend to see the benefits from and what that means for our U.S. expansion. So I think, if I start with expanding on what Nigel has already said, this is an acquisition we've long had on literally the top of our wish list. So we've talked about our strategy in M&A has been in Academic because it has more predictable revenue streams, higher margins and more opportunity for digital. We've talked about that move from print to digital. And Rowman & Littlefield [is] all 3 of those things underpinned by very, very high-quality content. So our sales teams have been saying, for a long time, this is great content. We've seen great feedback already from people saying this is such good-quality content. This is the stuff that students and faculties really want. So that's been terrific from that perspective. We see opportunities for revenue -- to grow revenue at the moment. They have print and they have basic ebooks, but they have no BDR equivalent. There's no licensing to any other sort of BDR equivalent platforms. So that's all new, and that's all opportunities for us. So I think that was the key part of the question, is what can we do? And what we've done is to guide you on that, as we've said that we intend to increase the BDR targets. So the current BDR target to hit for February 2028 is GBP 37 million. That's our entirely organic target. And what we've said is that, through this acquisition, we intend to add another GBP 4 million of revenue to that target. So that's revenue that currently does not exist but, by creating digital and creating great data out of the content that they currently have, we will create digital products around that and sell them to get an extra GBP 4 million. So that's increasing that target to GBP 41 million. And of course, we intend to continue growing after that. We wanted to make sure everyone had a clear near-term target to focus on. So the funding for this, so to reiterate my point, we see revenue opportunities. They already run very leanly and we think the opportunity is all about increasing new revenue rather than taking on cost. We've been asked about U.S. expansion. So as you know, we already had a very successful U.S. business, as Tamsin said earlier. That's over 56% of our revenue in the year just gone. And we have a very strong management team in the U.S. with Sabrina McCarthy, who joined us at the end of the beginning of April as our new President of the U.S. business. And she has a very strong experience from Ingram as a distributor, so very strong experience not only [indiscernible] in the academic and consumer businesses, but also bringing in and integrating acquisitions. So I think one of the questions was about how do we -- how are we confident about expanding in the U.S.? So first of all, it's what we've already achieved. Second of all, it's the strength of our team there. But third of all, it's the fact that we have just fully integrated ABC-CLIO, which was a very significant acquisition for us that we made in December 2021. We fully integrated that, and that was a print and digital academic business. So we know we can do this because we've done it before, not at this scale, but we know we have a clear process around it. So that gives us some confidence, and I hope that does for you too. And then the final point on the acquisition was under funding. So we've talked about our GBP 66 million of cash at the year-end. And as you've seen that we took out GBP 30 million of debt funding in addition to that. And the reason for that was because we have quite lumpy cash flow. So the February year-end is a high point for cash flow. Almost immediately after that, we make a very high series of electronic payments which totaled this year to GBP 23 million. And we say that's why I'm very happy to release, because that's our share. That's what the royalties are going to be [indiscernible] that really reflects our success. So you can see, from that, we wanted some headroom in our ongoing operations, and we've taken out a 3-year, GBP 30 million loan, which is fully drawn down with Lloyd's to fund that. Our forecast is that we are able to repay that well within that 3-year period. And our forecast is for us to remain in a net cash position this year, albeit at a less elevated level than we've been used to in the past. So I think that's the acquisition. If we -- we've had some questions about Academic performance and the outlook, but I think we've covered those during the presentation. So if we can then move on to Sarah J. Maas, so Nigel, would you like to talk a bit about Sarah J. Maas, our outlook with her and how it's going?

Yes. Okay. Well, the -- our assumption is that we'll have a new Sarah J. Maas book at least every 2 years. So if you look at the publication dates of the 16 novels that we've published to date, you'll see that's about how it works out. So whilst I am not -- I don't have the information to say there will be one in the following year, that's certainly my hunch. And indeed, I think, on social media, she's been -- -- thought to be working away as you would when you have 3 series,, when you have to write them all. So I think the excitement will be great, and it just won't be in this year ending February 28, 2024. Although I should tell you, the paperback of House of Flame and Shadow, which will be a big event in itself, will come out as a new paperback edition before the end of this financial year. So we do really have a new strategy in [indiscernible] in paperback.

Thank you. And that next title is one of the 6 that we have, future titles that we [indiscernible] we already published. So you can see, in publishing terms, how strong we have that combination of new titles coming through, but also the strength of what we've already published over the last 12 years or so since. It's been an extraordinary journey for us and for her. One of the other authors that we've been asked about is Katherine Rundell. So as many of you noticed, she was both Author of the Year, Book of the Year and then a number of other accolades with her latest title -- or latest title on first fantasy book tapping into that fantasy genre [indiscernible] Impossible Creatures. And we're delighted to say that there are a further 2 books in that trinity, and we have a contract with her for both of those books. So we're extremely excited about that. She's such an astonishing writer. And [Technical Difficulty] [indiscernible] most of the U.K. as well. So that's Katherine Rundell. One of the other questions and sort of coming back to the sort of group level is, would we expect to grow -- would we expect our EPS to increase this year and by how much? So I think there what we will point you to is we've used the word exceptional about our trading this year based on this presentation and in the R&S with our results. We recognize that we had a really extraordinary year, particularly around the fantasy genre. And I think the expectation in the market, which we've -- before these results, which was in the R&S was a consensus market expectation for this year, the year ended February '25, was for revenue of GBP 284 million and profit before taxation and highlighted items of GBP 35 million. So as Nigel mentioned, we said that we provided a small upgrade to that. So we said that we would expect the revenue and profit to be slightly ahead of those expectations. So I hope that gives you a [steer] about what we're expecting from this year. So I think I'm just checking back through the various questions. I think that's covering the sort of Tier 1s. And just give me a moment to check those. I think the only other one that we haven't talked about was BDR, the sort of -- why our growth is more conservative going forward compared to the extraordinary double-digit growth we've seen over the past few years. And that's really about as we go from the astonishing success -- so as you all well know, going from GBP 0 to GBP 26 million, we've made huge leaps as our product becomes more mature. And also as the market matures slightly, that explains that slowing growth. So we're still expecting to see great growth. It remains very powerful. We're a direct-selling, high-margin business. And you can see, as Nigel referenced earlier, the scale of the opportunity there. So then I think the last question, which is traditionally what we finish on, is that -- are there any new titles that we would particularly recommend? So Nigel, could I start with you for this?

Well, the title that I would recommend to all of you, which is coming out on September 5, is called The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. And it's an account of the domination of India over China. In about the year 600, the Indians exported their religions, no less, to China. And it's just an extraordinary tale of things that you have know about but hadn't really considered before that are considerably exciting to readers. And I think it's going to be the big bestseller. I read it myself. It's a very readable book, an absolute page-turner. So that's one. And then it would be remiss of me to not tell you about a novel with the summer reading season coming up. And I would recommend something coming out on something like the 17th of July called Mice and Murder by the barrister and KC, Sally Smith. And set in 1904, the Lord Chief Justice is murdered with a dagger on the steps of his chambers in the inner temple on Page 1 and it's about a new barrister sleuth who is appointed to try to track down the murderer. It's just the most gripping, wonderful [indiscernible] novel you've read in years.

Thank you. Tamsin, how about you?

So at the moment, because my demographic is a sort of a young family, so we are reading together Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell. And then we are wading through [indiscernible] week. So you'll see [indiscernible] [Me] hopefully next year. It will take a little while. We're also a big fan of the 30-plants-a-week. Even I have managed to cook something from it over the last few weeks. My recommendation is this one actually, How the World Made the West, 4,000 Years of History, which looks absolutely fantastic, again, very readable, but an incredibly interesting book. And I have just reread The Explorer by Katherine Rundell, which is just a fantastic book. And in the middle of year-end in our results and the acquisition, as you can imagine, that was a very nice [indiscernible] bit of light relief. So I'll just remind you [indiscernible]. So with that, Nigel, can I hand back to you for some closing remarks?

Just to say our great thanks to you for coming to hear more about the Bloomsbury story as it moves into new territory. We've gone over the GBP 500 million market capitalization, some we hover one side or the other of it in the last week or so, which is a great milestone for the company, as are the new records that we've set in terms of turnover growth and critical acclaim. And we're very grateful to all of you who are our shareholders or who are considering becoming. So we have a lot more work to do and the conditions are promising. So thank you all very much indeed.

Perfect. Nigel, Penny Tamsin, thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session? As you know, we automatically redirect you to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few minutes to complete and shall be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management at Bloomsbury Publishing plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.