As we have remarked, 37 years into our history, and in the very complicated year that was, the 12 months to the end of February, we managed to produce our record sales and profit. Dan, I've been praising you in your absence, for the pulling off the stock market opening. I'm most indebted to Alistair for my second bullet point, the flywheel effect of Bloomsbury generating cash from acquisitions to make more acquisitions of books, illustrators, digital content, and further companies to acquire. The revenue, as you know, is up 15% more than the industry's 2%. And I'm even more excited in the way that that growth is, I think, 43% measured back to the beginning of the pandemic. We've grown almost by half in those 2 or 3 years.
Profits up 16%, GBP 31 million. We not only crossed the quarter of a million pound barrier, do I mean that?
Mm-hmm.
At GBP 250 million, yes, but also the GBP 30 million profit thing. A lot of this is down to Bloomsbury Digital Resources. Those of you who have been writing about it for years, the three gentlemen sitting there were on the money from the start, and it's really working. The dividend, you will see our favorite slide of dividend growth over the last 25 years. It was 10% this year. Where did the growth come from? It came from first of all, our non-consumer division, where sales were up 19%, in the bottom left tablet there, and the consumer division, up 12%. We haven't announced any major new acquisitions in this period, but as you know, it's just about timing.
I can confirm to you that we are as active as ever, in the matter of assessing opportunities and avoiding ones that aren't.
Morning, everyone, and nice to see you. Great to be doing this in person. Financial highlights, revenue up 15%, pre-tax profit up 16%, and the EPS up 18%. Even by our standards, that's a nice set of results. Moving on to what's behind this, both divisions did well. You can see on the far right-hand side, the non-consumer, 19% increase in the revenue, and we've increased the margin from 11% to 13%, that's been part of our long-term projection of what we're working to, and that's resulted in that profit increasing by 43%, that's a very nice result. I think five years ago, six years ago, 13 million was pretty much our entire Bloomsbury profit for the year, and now we're generating that just off non-consumer.
That's a real testament to how well everything is working. On the consumer side, 12% growth there, and we've held the margins around that 11% mark, delivering a small uptick in the profit year-on-year. Moving now into a bit more detail in the revenue. On this slide, you can see, as Nigel said, we're ahead of the market. The U.K. consumer market was up 2%, and the U.K. academic market was up 3%. We talked about the overall market being up 4%, you can see our results are way ahead of that, and that's really testament to, you know, the strengths and quality of our sales and marketing. Fundamentally, what we're doing is what people want to buy.
Calling out here for the first time, the AMP growth of 28%, and a lot of that is fueled by BDR, and that's both our organic BDR growth, which we'll come on to, and the impact of the acquisitions, and particularly ABC-CLIO, that's really the synergies between the two are working incredibly well. Children's here to call out 17% growth in children's, and we'll come on to a bit more of that later. As you know, many of you have followed us for a while, that's on the top of we've seen some very strong growth in children's over the last few years. To continue to deliver that growth is great. Moving on to the revenue by channel.
As you know, our aim is to produce amazing content and then get it out into whatever channel best suits whoever the customer is, whether it's a retail consumer or an academic market, part of the academic market. In here, calling out again, that BDR 41% growth, I'm afraid we're going to mention that a few times because it's great. Also calling out audio, 29% growth in audio. As you know, that's still a small market, it's really nice to see that really growing in a way that I think the pandemic. We didn't see the growth for very obvious behavioral reasons in the pandemic, coming out of that, we're starting to see that really, really motoring. Then 25% growth in e-books.
That's a combination of different content within the consumer side, then that demand for academic e-book. Lastly, to call out the resilience of print. I think, you know, a while ago, not many people would have been predicting 9% growth in print in 2023, especially given how strong the digital channels are. There's real resilience there. Just an update on our strong financial position and one of my personal favorite slides. Strong cash generation again. We've reported in the statement 107% cash generation over the period, and that's meant that we now have GBP 51 million of cash, which as Nigel said, we are very, very keen to put to good use in terms of fueling further acquisitions.
Working capital, you see that increase in working capital. This is essentially driven by increased stock. Part of that is coming from the FX impact, but part of it is fundamentally an impact of the, as we've talked about, we printed longer and higher over a period in order to mitigate some of the supply chain challenges. That's where that's coming out. If we move now on to the cash flow, to just update you there. The key movements on this slide, you can see that GBP 31 million in profit, are highly cash generative, as we talked about. We paid out continued dividend growth. That's about GBP 9 million going out in dividends. Working capital has been pretty much break even. That compares to...
Remember last year, we had a big positive move in working capital, next year we'll probably see a sort of similar break-even levels going forward. Just on the right-hand side, you can see we've invested more in advances. That was during the year. Since the end of the year, as you know, we've signed a new four-book contract with Sarah J. Maas. We're also delighted that we paid out more in royalties. It's about the only payment I'm really happy about, apart from the dividends, and that reflects the great sales that we've been able to deliver for our authors and illustrators. Here's our very pleasing growth slide.
There's our staircase, and it's good to see that gap between the previous year and this year is one of the steepest. And I think has enabled us to appeal as an investment to a whole different kind of funds than we would if we didn't have such a great dividend increase. How are we investing for growth? As you've seen in our dividend policy, which has strong cash cover and earnings cover of 2 times, investing in organic growth. I think we used to be told that you couldn't make loss-making investments as a small public company, but we told the market about BDR when we went on our mission to dramatically grow it, and it did incur losses to begin with.
They were all projected, and we found that we had great support from the market. Thank you all for your patience back then in whenever it was.
Sixteen
... 16
yeah, when we announced the GBP 15 million and GBP 5 million revenue and profit targets for BDR, which we managed to achieve. This gives me great faith in our ability to invest in organic growth and not just shiny, easily quantifiable acquisitions outside content. There's the day job, which is normal investments in author advances, where you see a stunning GBP 14.8 million invested in author advances, compared to GBP 12.6 million in the previous period. We'll let you know in a year or two if we got that right, but it's feeling pretty good at the moment. The quality that literary agents are bringing us, their best books. We sometimes have to buy them competitively, but lest that look too frightening, it isn't all a casino.
Most, the vast majority of the books we publish are new books by existing Bloomsbury authors. We do actually have a pretty good sense of how they're gonna do 'cause we have our internal track record to consult. There are the flashy books by new people that sort of suddenly appear and cost a lot of money and win prizes and sell millions in 1 case out of 10. That's what we do. Acquisitions, we are in a very good position now with them. It was only recently that we appointed our first full-time M&A in-house colleague. You remember the great Jonathan Glasspool, who used to come to these meetings. He fit academic acquisitions in alongside growing our spectacular academic division from scratch. Now we have Vafa Payman-...
who we promoted internally, and he's extremely gifted at this. We're leveraging acquisitions to drive BDR growth. There is no better example of that than ABC-CLIO, where they've just brought us a whole ton of new, high-quality digital content, and excitingly aimed at a different market, the US high school market, as opposed to the academic market. With very topical new releases, including The Asian American Experience online, which has been taken up by high schools all over America. This says 19 strategic acquisitions completed since 2008. If you go back to our first one in 2000, which was A&C Black, that got us even more deeply into reference publishing, it's more than 30 acquisitions.
As I explain it, we went from having a bank overdraft to having GBP 100 million in the bank, thanks to Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and J.K. Rowling, and many other authors. We used that money to buy those 30 companies and to grow. That was very lucky. Diversified strategy. Bloomsbury is a portfolio of portfolios, that is our secret, if we have one. We're trying very hard not to keep it a secret, as you've heard before, we're the only publisher of our size in this country who combine academic and general publishing. It's such an obvious thing to do.
I cry when I think of our competitors not doing it, but there are reasons deep in their DNA why they don't and won't, such as being spawned out of entertainment conglomerates like Bertelsmann and, with a music company, and HarperCollins with Fox Studios and so on. It's kind of alien to them to also do academic publishing, but it's absolutely in our DNA, arising out of our original reference publishing, which dates back to the founding in 1986. That's the first portfolio, the balance of high streets or main streets, consumer demands, which, as we know, can be fickle, with its high points of the Christmas book market and the summer reading boom of buying paperbacks for the beach or downloading books to your Kindle to take with you on holiday.
On the one hand, with a different rhythm of academic publishing, where it's all about back to university in September or October, and it's about financial year-ends for these institutions. Our customers are institutions more than students themselves. When their year-ends come, they often spend big amounts of money that they have left before the start of the new year, and they save it up, sometimes over two or three years, to buy a Bloomsbury digital resource. Finally, the diversification of territories. We're now in all the big English language markets. What a gift of our birth, if you like, of this country that we have probably the world's most widely read in language if, even if there are more Spanish and Chinese speakers.
There are, the English language book market worldwide is huge, and it's booming in places like Asia that are on growth cycles of their own, completely different to in this country, where I won't mention anything about what we've done to our economy. That territorial balance, Penny, am I right in saying this is the first year in which America has been the largest source of our business, if you combine the digital bits and the trade bits?
Yes.
Which I think might not be.
Yes. This is right.
That's kind of amazing. In fact, that's what I'd be writing if I was you guys, 'cause it should have been our biggest unit for years, but we weren't quite managing it.
Now we are, and if we get it right, and we have an excellent President in America, Adrienne Vaughan, then that part of Bloomsbury should get bigger and bigger and bigger because America is the biggest English language book market in the world. We'll see. Anyway, that's our diversified strategy, yes, things are going wrong the whole time, as they are with other companies probably that you recommend. You just never know what's gonna happen, this sheer breadth of our diversity, unlike any other company in our industry, carries us forward.
Great. From our strategy down to what that actually means within AMP. Our AMP performance, as we said, was excellent. We were extremely pleased with that, picking out some highlights in here. 28% revenue growth during the year, over the five years, you can really see the scale of that growth. 84% growth over five years, that's a combination of BDR, really motoring, as well as the acquisitions, particularly RGP, and ABC-CLIO that have really delivered that growth. Crucially, we've increased the profitability. The point investing in this area, as we've talked about, repeatable revenues, it's much more predictable, crucially, it's higher margin.
We've seen there you see over that 5-year period, we've taken it down from 7% when the margin was softer because of the BDR investment, now to 16% in this division, which is really where we want it to be. That's very much, as Nigel said, been driven by the BDR strategy. You've got 41% revenue growth over there, and it's higher margin quality repeat revenues, which is what we're really all aiming for all of the time. Focusing on BDR, a quick, very quick reminder of our strategy, because I know we've got an extremely informed audience here, but it's about high margin, high quality, repeatable digital revenues. The success of this, just to reiterate, we've grown the revenue from GBP 6.5 million to GBP 26.2 million this year.
We were 24% ahead of our first 5-year target last year. We'll talk more about our new 5-year target. Again, what the impact of bringing BDR in and the migration to digital has done to that margin, so doubling that margin. Looking at the BDR KPIs. I mentioned earlier, organic growth of 18%. It wasn't just all about the ABC-CLIO acquisition. We're doing really nice organic growth in there, we have done last year. We've seen a 20% increase in the number of academic institutions. These are our higher education institutions. This is the market we already had, and we're seeing some really interesting things where we're cross-selling ABC-CLIO products into the higher education market. Nigel mentioned The Asian American Experience. That's been a really interesting...
I think pre the acquisition, we weren't expecting quite as much ability to sell what had previously been schools products into the universities. That's absolutely what we've seen. Then we've acquired 4,500 U.S. schools as customers with ABC-CLIO. On the next slide, we're talking about the opportunity and giving you some idea of the scale of that market, so you can see.
It's a presentation that I was supposed to be sending.
Hello, mate.
Oh.
Yeah.
That's okay.
Don't worry, guys. It's just an AI thing.
Crucially, the repeatable revenues element of this. Our customer retention rate in our academic institutions, we've kept that above 90%. Looking at the opportunity here, our new target is to achieve a further 40% organic revenue growth over the next 5 years to reach about GBP 37 million of turnover. To be absolutely clear, future acquisitions in this area will be upside to that. This is what we think we can do. This is what we believe we can do with what we've already got. This replaces that previous target, which was set pre the ABC-CLIO acquisition. We thought it was worth bundling the whole thing together and setting ourselves a more ambitious target.
In terms of the why we think we can do that, so sharing, giving you an update on the academic institution market, as we've said to you before, it's about, we think it's about 5,000 institutions. That's institutions teaching subject areas we're in the English language, and we're in just over half of that at the moment. The addressable schools market is about 27,000 U.S. schools, and we're in about 4,500 of those. Both of those, we're including those to give you an idea of the, the market penetration we have at the moment, and also the potential scale of what we can continue to do. Moving on to a very current hot topic.
I got the AI slide, everyone. AI is a great business opportunity for Bloomsbury, for reasons I'll explain, and a great threat to humanity, as the Daily Mail says in its headline, sitting on the table outside there. Why is it good for us? Well, because we are known for our brand authors. If you want to read the new Khaled Hosseini novel, you can't buy any old thing printed out by ChatGPT, and you have an absolute urge, as with all forms of sequels in life, whether in movies or music or on television, to know what happened next, if it's in series form, or just what that author is up to next. The very great American novelist, Ann Patchett, has her new novel, Tom Lake, coming out in August.
Everyone who is among her huge fan base are waiting to buy that. You know, what's a free AI novel going to do to compete with that? If our high quality and unique copyright licenses in the majority of our business are why we're different to those companies in America who famously suffered a couple of weeks ago, it is also the case in our sort of non-fiction publishing, where ChatGPT could write a credible book that what makes academic content special of our competitors as well as ourselves, is the process of peer review.
Peer review by, I think it's five separate authorities before we publish any academic book, is what assures students and researchers, readers, and users of the accuracy of the material. Whereas, as we know, generative AI is famous for its hallucinations, as they call them, including, we got it to write a history of Bloomsbury, and I was flattered to see that George Orwell had helped me start Bloomsbury. Down and out in Bloomsbury, I guess. We produce highly creative, interactive, and dynamic online products that are sold to the librarians, who are the gatekeepers to those, aren't gonna be choosing AI things. What's good about it? What's good about it is it can enhance productivity, customer experience, and market insight.
It can produce marketing materials, what we call Advance Information sheets, brochures, leaflets, by drawing on its reading of the book itself, and so on. Equally, Sam Altman, as you know, the Chief Executive of OpenAI, said in an interview in The Times and the Daily Mail this morning, that this is a threat to humanity, and it will one day turn off ventilators and blood dialysis machines in hospitals to kill us all. What's the next slide? I've been saying that for six weeks now. I have a son-in-law in AI for 15 years, and I'm thrilled to see that's now what the press are saying, too. We've really got to watch out. Non-consumer.
Moving from the very macro to the much more community focused niche publishing in special interest. As you know, 2 years ago, we brought in a much more targeted publishing strategy, we're very focused on these key areas, building the communities. The key thing that we were very focused on here was bringing this back to profit, which is what we've done. We will remain very focused on this, and I think it's been really positive to see how well, in particular, some of the games areas are doing, where we've been plugging away for some time, award-winning and commercially very successful games, as well as our long association with Wisdom.
Consumer, adult trade, or you might say, books, that was the original, if you like, division of the company that started in 1986. It's very good to see, subject as it is to the ups and downs of taste and fortune, that the portfolio has done quite well this year, up 5%. That we had not 1 but 2 authors selected for the once a decade Granta selection of the best of the upcoming authors. In 2013, I think it was, Kamila Shamsie, who's been one of the highest-selling Bloomsbury authors of recent times, and winner of the Women's Prize, was chosen as an obscure new writer. Or was it 2003?
It helped establish her reputation as it is doing now for these unknown first-time writers, Olivia Sudjic and Saba Sams. We've won some other great prizes. The standout book on this page is Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. She is an author that our editor, Alexis Kirschbaum, spotted when she won the Audible short story competition, and Alexis went to the event for that prize and sought her out and signed her up on the spot. She's now written her first full-length novel, as opposed to short story. Trespasses is the book that I would unhesitatingly recommend to each of you to read if you want a real page-turner, set in the troubles in Belfast in the 1970s, and a young schoolteacher...
falling in love across the richer, religious divide, with a Protestant human rights barrister she meets in a pub. It's if you liked Kenneth Branagh's Belfast, you will love this novel. It's now down for the Women's Prize coming up soon. Children's trade, Harry Potter, unbelievable how it continues in its 26th year, I think it is now. Really exciting news, there is a new Harry Potter in the autumn, The Wizarding Almanac. You know, Harry Potter fans are kind of nerdy, and they love comparing their knowledge of the spells, and the Latin names, and the characters, and their how they sit in relation to each other, and family trees. Now there's an almanac, entirely conceived by the Bloomsbury children's team, heavily supported by J.K.
Rowling, with fabulous illustrations. Watch this space, and we'll soon be announcing, but not today, what's happening with the 2 further illustrated titles in the original series that has been so successful for the company. Sarah J. Maas, how lucky are we to have stumbled upon Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling, and then to stumble on Sarah J. Maas, who's now written 15 books, which is incredible, across 3 completely different series, different worlds, that have their own markets. 2 of them are aimed at young adults, and the 3rd is aimed at adult adults, very adult adults. We are deeply fortunate that one of our editors in New York was looking at self-published authors who were doing well, and spotted Sarah, and signed her up for world English rights.
Unlike Harry Potter, where we stupidly don't have it in America because we had no American company to have it in 1997. It's one of the reasons we started Bloomsbury USA, we'd never be in that position. We do have this in America, it's in America where her biggest sales by a mile come. Why is she so popular? You're all aware of the phenomenon that is BookTok, you know, largely older teenagers making 15-second videos of themselves emoting about why they liked a particular book, they love Sarah J. Maas. Sarah J. Maas is the most successful author on BookTok, if you combine her not one, but two entries in the BookTok impact list. I'm pleased to say seven future titles under contract, four of them we signed a new contract for only months ago.
A streaming series in the script room at Hulu, which, as you know, is a platform like Netflix. Long-term growth strategy. The goal is to grow this marvelous academic and professional division to put on 40% organic revenue growth in Bloomsbury Digital Resources in the next 5 years, to get that to GBP 37 million of annual sales. You remember that only a year ago, GBP 15 million was our target, so that's going gangbusters. In consumer, to find new authors like Louise Kennedy, we have a great team. It's a different team. Our legendary Editor-in-Chief, Alexandra Pringle, retired in January. She's trained her successors, and they're doing a fantastic job, and hence, say, those two young, undiscovered novelists chosen by the judges of Granta.
I think it's pretty amazing that 73% of our revenue is now from overseas, we aren't subject to the post-Brexit, post-Kwasi Kwarteng Truss budget Britain. We are all over the world. We're in the places like India and Asia, that are growing and not lifting their own moods, and we are deeply in the powerhouse that remains the U.S. economy. U.S. revenue is 48% of group revenue, just as it should be, it should be higher, it will be. Secondly, ESG. Like all of your companies and organizations, I'm sure we've poured energy in the last 3 years into loving our staff and treating them as the greatest assets that we have, haven't we, Penny and Natalie?
Yeah.
I was just questioned by the trade press about this driving over here. Everyone will get a 6% bonus. They don't know this yet, they will later today in their June pay packet for the achievements. It's a very simple bonus scheme. If we exceed the profit target fixed, everyone gets 6%. It's very simple, it's their work that has enabled us, and that of our authors, to get there. They got a 6% pay rise in March. They got a 5% pay rise the previous March.
Mm-hmm.
They got two cost of living payments in October and February. We have flexible everything. We do require people to be in the office two days a week, and we say which two days a week. Monday and Tuesday for consumer publishing, and Wednesday and Thursday for academic publishing. You don't have the Mary Celeste effect of coming in on the day that the people with whom you could have meetings to find they're not there. We have made, as many companies have, a great importance to our diversity and inclusion action. We have been amazed to win the industry's two leading diversity awards, and we're shortlisted for a CITI award, the Master Investor Small Cap Diversity and Inclusion Awards, to be determined, I think on the 21st of June.
We've also made strides in sustainability, and we have a full-time colleague Jude Drake, who drives us on this. Again, to my amazement, with all these large conglomerates we compete against, with their serious attitudes to this as well, we won the Industry Sustainability Initiative Award. How did we do it? We got rid of shrink wrap from Harry Potter box sets. We changed how we do our backlist printing. We don't put as much silver foil to bling you on the cover of paperbacks when you walk into a bookshop. Yesterday, we were sent a very interesting slide of the sustainability record of our top 10 shareholders, which we look forward to discussing with them. These are two very serious activities at Bloomsbury.
Our executive committee of six or seven of us meets weekly now. We used to meet monthly. We're really managing the company in a hands-on way. We actually met daily during the first year of the pandemic. What's coming? Well, some of this has come, but since the 28th of February. The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan is a history of climate. You remember, he's the Professor of Global History at Oxford at Worcester, who wrote The Silk Roads, which was an academic book that could have sold 50 copies very happily. In fact, it sold 500,000 copies. He brings his kind of rockstar academic qualities to the very topical history of climate, starting with Adam, in Miltonic fashion, walking out of the gates of paradise into the uncertain climate of the early Earth.
You see other major forthcoming titles, such as The House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas, and Impossible Creatures by the brilliant academic and children's writer, and now biographer of the great poet John Donne, Katherine Rundell. In the academic division, books that you may or may not take home with you, Fabric Science, an incredibly important book. We have 53% of the American textbook markets in fashion studies, and this is the kind of book that they flock to. Critical Thinking Skills by Stella Cottrell is an example of a very important area for us in the post-Red Globe Press acquisition era at Bloomsbury, which we bought from Springer Nature, and we are major publishers now of thinking skills and books. In conclusion, flywheel effect. Thank you again, Alistair.
I would add also the virtuous circle of people seeing our books being reviewed, and featured in the press, thanks to our very strong publicity department, noting the name Bloomsbury is the same as the name on the cover of the books, and the same as the name of the stock or share on the London Stock Exchange. That's another virtuous circle spinning alongside the flywheel. Resilience demand, I think that's a mixture of strategy, and luck, and timing, mainly strategy. BDR is continuing to give to us with quite astounding orders coming in from all over the world.
Our biggest customers range from the University of North Rhine Westphalia, to the University of Alberta at Edmonton, to our number one customer, New York University, followed by Monash University in Australia. What do these institutions have in common? Large research departments in their universities that require digital resources as learning resources. As we say, trading has started in line with the board's expectations.