Good morning and welcome to all analysts here in this room and to shareholders and potential shareholders watching the webcast, and we welcome all of you. I'm Nigel Newton, I'm Executive Chairman, and I'm joined by Keith Underwood, Chief Financial and Operating Officer of Bloomsbury Publishing.

Have we got the next slide up? Yes.

Excellent. Our strategy of diversification has created a portfolio of portfolios, much as you all do in your own portfolios of companies you invest in, balancing the vicissitudes of one area of publishing against the other.

We've created a resilient model for long-term success, and we're pleased to report revenue of £151.6 million and adjusted profit of £16.8 million with a margin of 11.1% and the dividend up 5%. We have a strong consumer frontlist of new titles this year with growth heavily weighted to the second half.

We're very excited and fortunate to have two new Sarah J. Maas novels, the first of which is being launched next week, and the second in January.

The Academic & Professional division has seen good underlying growth in all territories in both print and digital formats, excluding AI income. We are confident in delivering record profit in line with profit expectations for our financial year 2026/27.

We have a strong balance sheet with net cash of £22.8 million, which brings capital allocation to the fore. The dividend slide, always my favorite.

As the chart shows, Bloomsbury has delivered 31 years of consistent dividend growth since flotation in 1994. In the first half of 2026/27, this continues with a 5% dividend increase, which reflects both the achievements of the financial year and our confidence that the company is well positioned for further growth.

Let's recap on the investment case. For Bloomsbury, this is one of really strong shareholder returns derived from a diversified portfolio across Academic and Consumer Publishing, across print and digital formats, and from an increasingly international audience.

As Nigel mentioned earlier, this diversification has created a more resilient model for long-term success. Last year, in FY '26, the Academic & Professional division had strong profits doubling to £25 million, which mitigated lower profits in the Consumer division.

This year, with Academic & Professional returning to a more normalized run rate, we're set to deliver record results driven by an exceptional performance in the Consumer division. That is the portfolio of portfolios in action.

In terms of the financial highlights for the first half of this year: revenue, £151.6 million; and adjusted profit of £16.8 million with a margin of 11.1%, taking EPS to 16.67 pence. Net cash position is really strong at £22.8 million, and the dividend is up 5%, continuing that fantastic track record of unbroken dividend growth.

If we just look at the divisional analysis now. As expected, revenue and profit from the Consumer division is slightly lighter in the first half of the year, but the Consumer division is expected to really drive forward in the second half in a year that is very second-half weighted, as we've always said.

Sales in October and September, really encouraging and very strong. The Academic & Professional division delivered really good growth of 6% on an underlying basis, that's excluding AI within the numbers as well, delivered growth in all territories and in all formats.

You can see their print sales, for example, increasing by over 30%, showing strong demand for what is a really resilient format. The intellectual property value and quality of our academic list has enabled us to continue our non-exclusive AI licensing agreement into this financial year, although, as we have always said, it's to a lesser quantum this year leading to a reduced margin.

Consumer bestsellers. In Romantasy, Sarah J.

Maas is launching not one, but two novels in the most popular of her three series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, known as ACOTAR. The first is A Court of Splintered Harmony next week, and then A Court of Forgotten Melody in January.

In addition, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is already benefiting from the new Harry Potter TV streaming series starting on Christmas Day itself, no less, on HBO Max.

I predict a takeover of all families to be gathered around the television. We certainly look to each of you in this room and on this webcast to be part of what is going to be a really great moment as a new generation of readers is brought to Harry Potter.

The second half is a wonder. Far in it, we've seen Gillian Anderson's successor volume to her WANT, called MORE, in the bestseller list in September, and Stephen Graham was an instant bestseller with Letters to Our Sons.

Moving on to the Academic & Professional division, it's had a very good start to the first half of this year: revenue growth of round about 6% to £48.8 million and profits of £6.8 million. As I said, good underlying growth in all territories and in all formats, excluding AI.

Just more specifically, we have expanded, as I mentioned before, our business in Asia by opening up the Singapore office as a hub to further capitalize on the projected growth in student numbers in that region. The team in this area is now really developing new propositions.

We've got a new Asia Studies digital resource to bolster the BDR platform. We're establishing key relationships with new institutions.

Following a range of successful meetings at the Beijing International Book Fair, we're advancing publishing partnerships with several major publishing houses in China. Moving to the balance sheet, as you can see, it remains very strong.

Total net assets for the year up at £213 million, and within working capital, we've actively managed down our finished stock balances year-on-year and are continuing to drive operational efficiency. Our net cash position, as you can see, has improved from £2.4 million last year to £22.8 million this year, driven by the profit drop-through, but also working capital improvements, which I referenced.

Consistent with the prior years, this cash balance decreases in Q4—oh, in Q3 rather, before increasing again in Q4 ahead of the royalty run in March. Just taking that cash bridge, this just shows the movement from the end of last financial year through to the 6 months to the end of August.

Closing net cash balance of £22.8 million, and as we've said before, capital allocation priorities remain focused on internal growth initiatives to drive organic growth, debt reduction, which you can see we already did in the first half of this year, and also bolt-on acquisitions to deliver against our future growth strategies.

Summary and outlook. The Bloomsbury portfolio of portfolios, as you have seen, has created a resilient and successful model.

We have entered the second half with a strong net cash position and have had an outstanding start underpinning our confidence. We have a strong publishing list for the year ahead with exciting releases in major franchises, such as Harry Potter and Sarah J.

Maas. As such, the board has confidence in delivering record profit in this financial year 2026/27, in line with expectations.

Now, we would like to invite a question. Alastair?

Thank you. Three, naturally.

Thanks so much. Three questions, please.

Firstly, you noted some sales processes beginning in sort of the area of special interest. Just give us a bit of color on whether there are more of those to come and the kind of broader aspirations for the kind of improving contribution to profits as a result.

Secondly, just give us an update on your M&A pipeline, sort of key areas of focus, levels of activity in the pipeline. Then lastly, could you just talk a little bit more about sort of the underlying trends you're seeing in the market for Academic & Professional in terms of customer budgets on a like-for-like basis, customer numbers, new subject areas, and the like?

That'd be great. Thank you.

Customer budgets—

Customer numbers.

Numbers. Was there a third thing?

No. Okay.

Keith, perhaps you could take the special interest, M&A question, and I'll take the underlying trends.

Look, as we announced last time round, we talked about the vertical structure, which gives people a great deal of control and visibility over their bottom lines. Kathleen Farrar, who's running our Consumer division in the UK, has special interest now under that division.

We are looking at all ways in which we can drive margin up in the consumer area as well, and that includes looking at all divisions to make sure their operating is as effectively as we can. You would see that we've previously announced sale processes for Who's Who within that area and also the games division.

Those are progressing at the moment, and we will continue to look at areas within the Consumer division as well in order to drive margin within that particular area of the business.

M&A?

M&A pipeline, look, given the cash balances that we've got, we've laid out our capital allocation priorities. M&A is a part of that.

We continue to actively look at bolt-on opportunities that can continue to drive top-line growth and margin growth consistent with the way that Bloomsbury's done it before. Got a very good history as a business of being able to spot good opportunities and integrate them in a way that drives synergies across the operating business.

We are actively looking at opportunities at the moment, and we'll be able to say more about that in due course.

Underlying trends in Academic. Underlying growth is good in our Academic division in all territories, and I think what we've seen is perhaps a recovery from some of the knocks taken by political interference, if you like, in the normal running of the academic marketplace, particularly in the US and the UK.

I think there's been recovery there, and we remain confident in the budgets. The numbers is another story.

They're really going off the Richter scale in terms of growth in Asia in particular, and that's, of course, why we've started this base in Singapore in January, which is off to a terrific start. We believe we've adopted the right strategy there, and we'll see how we get on.

Hi.

Thanks. Will Larwood from Berenberg.

Three for me, please. Firstly, just in terms of the Harry Potter HBO series, I was just wondering if you could share any color in terms of orders from supermarkets, pre-orders, just general feeling around that ahead of the HBO release.

Secondly, in terms of some benefit from AI licensing deals in H1 and expected to continue into H2, what about sort of your conversations with other frontier models? How are those progressing?

Then finally, just in terms of the Anthropic settlement, can you provide if there's been any change to your expectations for that?

Thanks very much. I'll take HBO, and Keith, AI and Anthropic kindly.

The pre-orders are good, and the challenge for us has been to get the series back into the supermarkets, who backed Harry Potter so strongly when the original Warner Bros. films started coming out around 2000.

We've succeeded, the pump is primed. We have significant orders in the UK from the major supermarkets.

We've doubled down on that by seeking marketing from them to go with it, and I reviewed a list of the individual supermarkets' plans, summer planning, tannoy messages to drive people to the Harry Potter section. What's exciting about this release versus the films 27 years ago is it's the first time we've done a tie-in jacket, and so possibly we showed on the screen earlier, but we have a very cool jacket image of Harry wearing his Quidditch coat shot from behind and it says, "8, Potter," and it's very powerful.

I think they're going to fly off the shelves to a new generation of readers. There are something like 700,000 new 8-year-olds in Britain every year, and it's a long time since the books came out, I think that one of the joys of television is driving people to certain books.

Of course, they won't just read this book. The experience of the film release was that they would read the one and then the next and the next, and we saw them cascade through the bestseller list because they were already backlist titles by then.

It does feel as though HBO will take over Christmas Day itself, and so we'll watch this space. I've just answered your question in respect of the UK, but if you imagine our international sales team, who are very active at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2 years ago, replicating that performance in pretty much every major market in the world.

To remind you, we do have the English-language rights in Harry Potter in every country in the world except the United States. We have Canada, and the traditional Commonwealth countries will make up a big chunk of the market: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada.

The many other countries where reading a 500-page novel in a foreign language like English isn't a terrifying prospect to 8-year-olds, we will also succeed. Of course, unlike when the first ones came out, these are available in translation now as well, which will mitigate the market, but I think it's going to be very big.

AI.

I take the AI. Look, as we said, the quality of our academic list is such that we were able to take the original value that we got in FY '26 and see that roll forward into FY '27, which is great.

That value is included obviously in the first-half numbers that we've just announced, and we're expecting further value to come through in the second half of the year, and also to continue from that partnership into FY '28 as well. We've always said that that would be at a lower quantum than we were able to generate in FY '26.

That's still our expectation, but what we're also now starting to have is conversations with other parties as well, particularly in the specialist cases as well that you've got within the Academic & Professional arena, both in terms of training deals, which was our first deal that we did, but also increasingly in respect of specialist RAG deals that we're looking to strike as well. That's encouraging.

You asked about the Anthropic settlement. We are working through at the moment the disputes process with the settlement administrator.

That is a relatively lengthy process. We're working through it at the moment.

I'm not going to prejudge the outcome of the settlement process, but we still expect to receive double-digit million settlement as a result of that.

Hi.

Melanie from Peel Hunt. I've got two, please.

First one is, can you talk about how you're thinking about the level of marketing for Sarah J. Maas releases upcoming in the second half?

The second one is Asia for Academic has been going really well, now it's proven the concept, do you plan to invest harder in that region? Thank you.

I might help myself to both of those. The level of marketing for Sarah J.

Maas is, as you would imagine, very high, and it's not just us, it's the retailers themselves. If you're a retailer, you're searching for this year's big product, and many of them have concluded it's going to be Sarah J.

Maas. There are huge internal promotions happening.

To give you an example, Target were planning to create a kind of Sarah J. Maas boutique within their shops in the USA, of which there are many, with the new book, A Court of Splintered Harmony, as the hook and the centerpiece, but with a range of other merchandise relating to that universe.

Then in other places, more traditional forms of marketing, such as pallet sales where they just slap down a huge pallet at the end of an aisle, and the books are there, and that seems to induce increased buying. Some shops have produced special things they will give away of their own initiation and funding if you buy the new book from them instead of their competitor next door.

There are two kinds of marketing happening: our own marketing, which is considerable and very social media oriented, and then there's the marketing of almost every major retailer on Earth. This may well turn out to be the biggest-selling book of the year.

Certainly, that was the case with Sarah's previous launch, we'll see. Asia.

Yes, it's early days, we don't want to overcook this. Our plans are ambitious, but our execution is only about 9 months old at this stage.

As we mentioned earlier, we're creating an Asia Studies academic digital resource within BDR. We have an assiduous editorial team finding very interesting material that hasn't been digitized by anyone else for such a product, and I think, knowing what I know, I think that will turn what we're creating into a must-have product for most universities in the world, and not just a nice-to-have product.

We have our eye, of course, on China, which is such a huge academic market now, and we have various plans in the pipeline. Hello, Alex.

Good morning. Hi, Alex Pollen from Berenberg.

Some ones on cash, Keith, if that's all right. Just to reiterate that any settlement from Anthropic, from as far as you're concerned, is not included in any consensus forecasts at the moment?

Correct.

Any anecdotal examples around the working capital improvements as well, please? Any more detail you can give around whether that is something that changes you put in place since you've come in, etc., that have led to that sort of improvement?

Then on capital allocation, whether the high levels of cash or likely high levels of expected cash are changing any thoughts around that at all? Then, totally unrelated, a one on audio and just a general update on how you're seeing the audio market.

I'm glad he was looking at you when he asked most of those questions, Keith.

Let me just stress them in that case. Yes, for the consensus cash forecasts, Anthropic settlement is not built into those numbers.

In terms of the working capital improvements we've got, these are just a series of improvements that are being made. One of the things I would probably call out specifically, is just in relation to finished stock.

You will have seen that that is down considerably in terms of year-on-year. We've obviously got a slight build-up in the half year as we're stocking to sell some major titles, but if you look at it half year to half year, very significantly down due to a series of improvements that we've put in place around print run order management, disciplines in terms of sign-off and that, and also starting to use AI in terms of predicting print runs and trying to sort of drive intelligence through the use of that type of technology.

It's a series of improvements that the team are working on across the board, and I think they are starting to yield real results, and you can see that from some of the cash drop-through that we've got in terms of the operating profits that we've delivered. I am pleased with that.

There is more to be done, and we're continuing to look at the efficiency with which we can drive cash drop-through, but it's an encouraging start, I would suggest. Audio?

Audio, what a wonderfully growing market that is, as with the addition of Spotify with their [matey?] membership worldwide in the audio book area in November a year ago.

We've seen huge growth coming just from that quarter alone, but there are quite a handful of other customers buying audio editions from us, Apple among them. We see nothing but growth coming from that market.

Are there any other questions? Don't be shy.

Oh,

go for it.

Alastair's

feeling encouraged.

Let's keep going about Sarah. Hard obviously to sort of speak on her behalf, but sort of what do you think her appetite is to keep being an author, keep writing the new novels?

With all this excitement coming, she's signing a movie deal anytime soon?

You're absolutely right that no publisher ever speaks on behalf of their author and their IP is their business, but she's certainly shown great appetite in producing not one, but two books in a row. I'll leave that fact for you as the measure of it all.

I don't think since the days of Charles Dickens and novels being serialized in magazines have I ever seen two installments of a story come out so quickly, and we're very fortunate for that. As for the rest, you'll have to watch this space and gaze into your crystal ball.

The same, there have been no new announcements at all, and so I have no information to impart other than that one day these novels will make the most stunning films that will absolutely clear up. We need excitement for the future, and we can't be having everything all at once.

Okay. Thank you all very much indeed for coming and for hearing the story of we believe our record year to the end of February, but we still have to deliver a lot of that, watch this space.

Thank you.