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TWST: Can we begin with an introduction to Wolters Kluwer (OTC: WTKWY.PK), your industry and competition?

Ms. McKinstry: Wolters Kluwer is a multi-national information services company, with sales in EUR 3.8 billion, and we’re listed on the Euronext in Amsterdam (Euronext 100 index). Historically, WK has been long known as a publishing company, but we are well on our way to transforming ourselves from mainly a print-oriented publisher into an information and solutions provider to professionals. So if you look at the last several years, we’ve focused much of our investment in new products, producing a combination of proprietary content software and services that are all aimed at assisting professionals and making their workflows more productive. The company has over 19,000 employees that help to serve professionals, our customers in the fields of legal, tax, and business; health and education. WK is the largest legal and tax publisher in Europe, and the leading tax publisher in the U.S.. We are also the world’s second largest medical information services provided, and a leader in the European educational market. In addition, we’re well-known in the markets that we serve. Some of our key brands are names such as Lamy in France, CCH Publishing and Lippencott, Williams & Wilkins here in the U.S., Kluwer in the Netherlands, and Ovid Technologies, which is also a major online provider of health information worldwide. So that’s who we are. In terms of the industry, as I mentioned, our core markets are legal, tax, health and education. Our primary competitors vary a bit depending on which segment you’re speaking with. But the following companies we’re most often compared to are: Thomson, which we compete with primarily in the tax arena, and to a lesser extent in health and legal; and Reed Elsevier, with whom we compete with in the health and legal arenas

TWST: Can you tell us about the strategic direction you see the company taking over the next couple of years?

Ms. McKinstry: The direction is to continue our transformation from a pure publisher of content to an information provider and provider of solutions to our professional customer groups. So if you look down the road, say five years from now, what we see is that this transformation will be complete and that we’ll have a full range of proprietary content, software and service tools available to our customers. In addition, you should see us expand into some other market segments, most specifically the financial services segment, such as compliance.

TWST: What’s driving this transformation? What kind of changes and developments are taking place and affecting the landscape?

Ms. McKinstry: The biggest changes that affect our industry, and we anticipate these trends continuing, is the use of technology by our customers, as well as the pace of legislative change. If you think about this whole transformation I mentioned earlier, the migration to solutions from pure information is a trend in all of the markets we serve, whether it’s legal, tax, or health. This trend plays to our strength because we have really spent the last several years combining our proprietary content with software solutions to provide an overall solution to our customers. This migration to electronic products and growth of electronic products has been a defining element of our strategy over the last several years, and will continue to be a defining element of our strategy going forward. If you were to look at our electronic product revenue growth, for example, it’s been very strong. If you compare our half year results in ’02 with our half year results in [01], our electronic product revenues have grown 29%. Electronic products now represent 32% of total revenues. So we’re extremely focused on making sure that we assist our customers in that migration process from print to electronic, and more importantly, focusing our investments on electronic products, whether it’s an online Internet product or a software solution product. As professionals continue to adopt technology solutions, we believe that we are well positioned, compared to some of our competitors in this arena.