Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (BMY) Q4 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

I'm very pleased to greet you. I'm Nigel Newton, founder and chief executive of Bloomsbury, and I am joined by Keith Underwood, chief financial and operating officer recently appointed by us. So if I can move on to the first slide, please, of highlights, we make the point that our Portfolio of portfolios has been a resilient model through consumer and academic publishing. This makes us very rare, if not unique, in our industry. and is the basis of the good numbers that we're able to report to you today because like our shareholders on the public markets, we are not dependent on one type of revenue stream. We're exposed to both the consumer on the high street and the main street, and at the same time to the huge institutional buying power of tens of billions of dollars worldwide in academic libraries. Profits are up 7% to $44.9 million, and that is great because it's been the basis of the dividend being up 5%. We shall point out on a slide some of you are familiar with, the 31-year unbroken track record of Bloomsbury dividend growth. Hoorah. We have an AI licensing agreement that we announced in July that I'm very pleased to tell you is ongoing in financial year 2021. 26, 27. Completely separately from that, we announced in December a partnership with Google on a number of tools that are being developed. implemented throughout Bloomsbury to all 1,250 of our colleagues. We are creating the Bloomsbury brain that will ultimately read in its secured off-from-the-internet walled garden. a database of every word that we've ever published that we can utilize in so many different ways to make future decisions based on the evidence of the past, what to publish, how much to pay for books, how many copies to print of books, and many other things. We have streamlined and simplifi...