The Bookseller.com

8th September 2008

« Headlines

Christmas seals Hachette's lead

25.01.08 Alison Flood

Hachette Livre lengthened its lead on its rivals in 2007, racking up sales growth of 5.1% over the year and putting more daylight between itself and second-placed Random House Group. Hachette raked in a massive £298.8m in revenue in 2007 according to Nielsen BookScan, increasing its market share to 16.6% from 16.4% in 2006. RHG's top-line sales over the year were down 2.5%, but c.e.o. Gail Rebuck said if sales at newly-acquired Virgin and BBC Books were stripped out, Random's organic UK growth through BookScan was 3.8%. RHG's market share fell from 15.4% to 14.6% in 2007.

C.e.o. Tim Hely Hutchinson said Hachette's growth in a tough market was led by a "great Christmas. In common with the rest of the industry, we had a very tough few months earlier in the year, with some very high returns," he wrote to staff. "I have never known market conditions to be more difficult and, as a result, our great Christmas will just enable us to make our budget and achieve modest like-for-like growth, instead of bounding ahead as we might reasonably have expected."

Mid-range players generally experienced strong growth over 2007, with Simon & Schuster up 12.1%, Pan Macmillan up 12% and Egmont up 8.9%. Publication of the final Harry Potter helped send Bloomsbury's sales soaring by 140%.

But the Faber-led Independent Alliance—which showed the strongest growth in the market of 23% in 2006—struggled last year, with sales down 5.5% in what was widely agreed to be a tough market for literary fiction and serious non-fiction.

Looking ahead to this year, the heads of the UK's major publishing houses pointed to increasing financial uncertainty. "Nielsen figures don't take account of returns," Hely Hutchinson said. "Even if publishers are on average achieving 2% growth, that's less than the cost of inflation, and it puts real pressure on. There'll be a general atmosphere of belt-tightening in 2008."

"One hopes we may slither through with weak growth," Rebuck said. Penguin chief executive officer Peter Field agreed: "It's a flat market overall. We will see some profitable growth this year, but if you're looking for 10% topline growth, you're kidding yourself."

Hachette steals the show

Publisher Retail Todays Picks HarperCollins Hachette Penguin Bloomsbury Random House Macmillan Alison Flood