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TWST: Can we set the foundation with a quick introduction to Ingenta (London:IGA.L)?

Mr. Rowse: I founded Ingenta about four and a half years ago, in May 1998, with the vision of it becoming a business that would fill the gap between the owners of professional and academic content and the users of that content as that industry moved onto the Web. It’s a very fragmented marketplace, with 11,000 publishers publishing 100,000 publications for a very global audience. The world of paper was mediated by the librarians, who both paid the annual subscription fees for the journals and other publications in this space, and also physically provided them to the people in the libraries who were using them. The reason Ingenta exists is that as that world is moving onto the Web, there is becoming a separation between the licensing of the content, which is still happening through the librarians, and the actual delivery of the content directly to the end users. I felt four years ago that there would be a need for an industry-wide delivery platform to act as a distribution arm for the industry. That’s the niche that Ingenta fits in. To summarize what Ingenta does, for publishers we have a suite of services taking their subscription-based periodical content, turning it into Web-friendly formats and securely hosting it, and then we have a distribution and marketing activity making sure that it reaches the widest possible audience within the solely professional user base. The business model is that we charge the publisher for that service, and we then allow their customers to download freely from our site. But we charge people who haven’t subscribed on a pay-per-view basis. In that way it’s a bit like Multex.

TWST: Do you have a strong global reach?

Mr. Rowse: Yes, we’re very much a global player, with about 60% of our total revenue derived from the US, 30% from the UK and Europe, and about 10% from the rest of the world.

TWST: Who’s the key competition in this space?

Mr. Rowse: We’ve been going for about four and a half years. We have always competed against Highwire – it is part of Stanford University Library. Highwire works with about 200 of the most prestigious Biomedical Society publishers in the US. We work with about 5,500 journal titles, so we’re very much larger in terms of scale, and we’re trying to do something rather different from Highwire. They are our major competition for the higher end services we provide. There are a couple of smaller private company players who more recently entered the market as well at the lower end.

TWST: What’s your strategy going forward for the next 12 to 24 months and what objectives would you like to accomplish?

Mr. Rowse: The plan is really more organic growth. Our results for the year to 30th September 2002 were released last week. We were expecting to report total revenues of over $20m for the year, growth of 30%. However, because of a change in our accounting treatment at the September 2002 year-end, some $4.5m of the revenue from business generated in the year will now be recognized in the current year and beyond. This has a substantial benefit on the current year, when our brokers are predicting total revenues of almost $23m and earnings of around US$0.04 for the year. We are by far the largest player in a market that has still got a huge amount of expansion to go. There is still only around 15% of the world’s periodical literature available on the Web. We hope to be a big player in converting and hosting the other 85%.