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TWST: Rewinding a bit, what do you think the valuation of Lagardere (13021.PA) is?

Mr. Hoey: Again as I said, our valuation target is €100 and that’s based on some of the parts valuation, actually putting, attaching a comparative value to each of Lagardere’s media activities that it has. And, again, what are public market values for comparative activities and also trying to attach a value to the joint ventures that it’s finding in terms of providing content to distributions to platform operators and also working with them to build up new services. And at the moment, we’ve only done valuation in one of those that is the Canal Satelite deal. And that we sort of judged at an additional €10 per share. But that’s included within the €100.

TWST: So do you think this covered mostly the media conglomerates, as well, or are there other companies or things that we should highlight here? In the beginning you mentioned that you do segment your coverage.

Mr. Hoey: I only mentioned Lagardere because it’s a difficult one to actually push into a sub-sector because it’s got a finger in every pie, in every sub-sector of media and I guess the only other company which would, sort of, be a little like that would be Pearson (PSON.L), but again, it’s pretty much tidying up its portfolio, having shoved all its TV assets into RTL (RTL.L). So it’s now emerging as pre-specialized business publisher and educational publisher. So it’s included now more within a sort of first group that I’ve mentioned, Reed (REED.L), Reuters (RTR.L), Wolters Kluwer (864601.F), etc., going more there than it does within this kind of conglomerate tag.

TWST: And where do you see they’re heading? Do you think they have a positive outlook?

Mr. Hoey: Certainly. I must say then, the key now for them is the educational market and what they are looking at is trying to become a dominant player basically for Anglo-Saxon markets, I think you could take it. And when you talk of education, it’s not just a revision of school textbooks, although that’s obviously still the main part of it but it’s also looking at the increasing growth and importance of home education. And increasingly that is being delivered online, either by CD-ROM or increasingly via the Internet. And also in terms of other areas of educational publishing such as educational support kits for teachers and educational software in terms of the amount, with the increasing emphasis being placed on schools and institutions and managing their own budgets, helping them to do that through software provision and online support there. So it’s an area which should actually be sharing far faster growth organically than it has in the past. Not that it’s being bad in the past but you can quite easily see the growth rates now averaging between 10% and 15% per annum.

TWST: Would you say it’s an expensive stock at the moment?

Mr. Hoey: I don’t really have a good feel for that. So I would kind of hesitate because I don’t really cover it that well. What you’d have to do is a break up value in terms of costing out what you think the stake in RTL Group is worth, what the educational publishing activities are worth and any kind of valuation that you’d put on the business publishing at FT and FT.com. But as I don’t cover Pearson, I can’t really give you a steer on that one. But I guess that’s the way you should be looking at it.