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TWST: Can we start with an introduction to Taylor & Francis (London: TFG.L) including a brief historical sketch?

Mr. Smith: Taylor & Francis has actually been in existence for over 200 years. It published its first journal in 1798. Curiously enough, it’s only been a quoted company since 1998. It spent a long time as a private company and has subsequently had a very successful stock market debut. At the moment it is a company that fits into the FTSE 250, with 900 employees, in the UK, US and Asia. We’re a very focused publishing business specializing on what’s traditionally known as scientific, technical and medical(STM), and academicmarkets. The analysts’ forecasts for the year are about £150 million turnover, and about £35 million operating profit. Our position in the journals marketplace is a publisher of leading journals in very specific scientific, social science, medical and lifescience areas. In the books business, it is the same; we have very strong niche positions in areas like education, philosophy. That’s a very quick thumbnail sketch. TWST: What’s the overall game plan? Perhaps you can give a brief synopsis of the direction the company will be taking and the objectives and milestones you are aiming for over the next couple of years? Mr. Smith: We obviously don’t disclose our financial targets to the market. But, crudely we want to stay in the areas in which we’re strong. In other words, a publisher of scientific, technical and medical journals and books. That’s where we want to be. Our overall goal of course would be to take the number two position in this market. Number one is occupied by Reed-Elsevier. So our medium and long-term goal is to try to push ourselves into that number two position, both by organic growth, and we’ve got a strong track record there, but also by acquisition. As you are probably aware, the market is very polarized. You’ve got Reed-Elsevier at the top of this pile and then you’ve got a large number of companies of a similar size below it; typically between a quarter to a fifth of the size of Reed-Elsevier. So our goal is to move away from that pack giving us stronger market share and all that delivers operationally and financially.

TWST: How do you differentiate yourself when you do look at that pack of similarly sized players? Are there some distinct advantages that you bring to this space?

Mr. Smith: Well, simply, in the publishing business your imprints and your authors define you. For instance, we have one of the world’s biggest selling biology books, The Molecular Biology of the Cell., which succeeds partly because it’s a terrific book, but also because of the authors we have. It’s the same in journals. If you have the key editorial board and the key journal in a niche like for example Remote Sensing, then that gives you a very special position with higher barriers to entry.

TWST: Can you tell us where you are in terms of online distribution, your sense of customer demand for this media platform and what your strategy is in this area?

Mr. Smith: Sure, first let me just talk about books for a moment because that gets less airtime, it seems less sexy to people. We have digitized our top 3,000 titles, and we’re about to do another 2,000, to bring it to 5,000. What we’ve done by digitizing our books is enhance functionality, letting people buy a chapter, make up their own book, or just rent, if you like, a chapter or a piece for a week, a month or whatever. And we’ve seen very strong growth in that area. It’s still not a material part of our business, but we’ve seen strong growth and this has encouraged us to actually digitize more books.