Welbeck reports 'well-balanced' results for first year's trading

Welbeck Publishing Group (WPG) has reported turnover of £13m and operating profit of £1.3m in 2019 in its inaugural financial results, taking stock of its first nine months of trading.

Publishers Marcus Leaver and Mark Smith, who respectively held roles as the former c.e.o. of The Quarto Group and former c.e.o. of Bonnier's Zaffre division, set up the new publishing group, encompassing newly acquired Carlton Books and Andre Deutsch, in April 2019.

Accounts for the year ending 31st December 2019 show the company's gross profit was £5.5m, with net assets of £3.3m, in line with expectations. Of the group's turnover, £3.6m came from the UK, with £3.2m in Europe and £6.2m for the rest of the world.

Figures in the accounts also show the company paid £150,800 in redundancy costs following its purchase of Mortimer Books, the company it acquired when it took on Carlton, while the net cash outflow on the acquisition was £5.7m.

In the same year it transitioned from an illustrated coedition packager to a trade publisher, with a new focus on trade sales in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand. The illustrated business "continued its historical robustness", Welbeck Publishing Group's directors reported, while the combined business "delivered a well-balanced result for the year".

In 2019, Jon Elek became group publisher for Welbeck’s commercial fiction imprint Portland Press, and Wayne Davies and Alex Allan were onboarded as group publishers in its Carlton Books division, while James Horobin was recruited from Bonnier to lead Welbeck's UK trade and export teams.

The result of key appointments made for the planned expansion into adult fiction, adult non-fiction and expanded children’s offering has postively impacted on 2020's results, the directors said, adding it resulted in "increased output" and "contributed to solid unaudited results in 2020, despite the vagaries of the pandemic". However, the company's 2020 results have yet to be disclosed.

According to the accounts, the company has used various measures to mitigate the impact of Covid-19, including salary deferrals from staff, a £2.5m Coronavirus Business Interruption loan and a rent deferral on its central London offices. These had helped maintain publishing activity and ensured a full programme of releases for 2021.

Executive directors Smith and Leaver commented: "We have seen a successful integration of Carlton Books into WPG and we’re both pleased with these first steps. Investments were made in the key areas of publishing, sales and operations in 2019 and helped us deliver a resilient result in 2020.

"We would both like to thank our team, our authors, our illustrators, our international partners, our printers and the literary agent community around the world, who have all been instrumental in helping us achieve these results in 2019, as well as helping the team at WPG begin to implement its strategic vision for 2020 and beyond."