Mr. Geltenpoth: I started my first publishing house at the age of 17. Two years later, in 1989 we founded Computec: together with Gong Publishing, a media company here in Germany. We were publishing, right from the beginning, computer game magazines with CD-ROMS, or at the beginning there were discs attached. We grew the business within nine years from zero to around DEM 40 million revenue, and in only four years, we became the market leader in this segment in Germany. We now sell approximately 1 million magazines in Germany, most of them with CD- ROM. And in 1997, we started with online games. We were the pioneer in this area. We now have around, 5,000 online game customers, and we just acquired an online game developer to increase this business with more online games.
TWST: Give us a little look at what you consider your marketplace today,
and how you see that market changing or evolving? Whether it's primarily
country focused or European focused?
Mr. Geltenpoth: The basic market which we are concentrating on, is the
underlying market, the market for computer and video games. It's a huge
and still fast-growing market. For example, if you take figures for
Germany alone, it's now DEM 2 billion, it's about 1 billion market in
Germany alone, which will triple over the next four years. The main
players in this area are Sony, with the Playstation, Nintendo, Sega with
Dreamcast, and, of course, the various PC game publishers, for example
Electronic Arts which is listed on the NASDAQ. So it's a very exciting,
fast-growing market: the market growth over the last years has been
around 20% to 30% year by year, and this market affects our own market,
which is the market for PC and video game publications and related
Internet services. So we now publish 8 magazines in Germany. We are
active in the US with two major titles which we launched in October last
year. We are publishing one title in Scandinavia together with a joint
venture partner, it's a 50-50 joint venture. We are active in France,
where we acquired a stake in a publishing company which is now
publishing 6 different game publications. And we have created a start-up
in the UK, also publishing a major publication for Playstation. And this
expansion happened only within a year. We went public in Germany on the
Neuer Markt, end of November 1998. So, within only 12 months we
internationalised into France, Scandinavia, the UK and the US, and are
now going to expand further in Europe. With every start-up we have done,
we became market leader right from the beginning. We are now publishing
the market leading, independent magazine for Playstation in the UK with
a circulation of about 250,000 copies sold. We are publishing two major
titles in the US, incite PC Gaming, incite Video Gaming, total
circulation of about 800-900,000 copies sold per month. In Scandinavia
it's 100,000 copies; France is around 200,000 copies per month. So
within only a year, we doubled our sold circulation and we started a
major Internet destination called www.incitegames.com, which contains
everything concerning the PC and video games. And I think what's also
different to a lot of media companies is that we are now a multinational
company, and our editorial teams are all connected. Currently, there is
a lot of editorial content coming from the US, flowing into Germany,
Scandinavia, the UK and France. There is editorial content from the UK
flowing to Germany and the US. And so every country is producing and
delivering editorial content to each other, which, on the one hand,
reduces the editorial costs, the production costs dramatically; on the
other hand, increases the quality of the magazines.
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