Harper Results Are Soft In the US, Strong In the UK, As eBooks Stay At 10% Worldwide

PublishersLunch

News Corp. reported second quarter sales after the close of the market Wednesday. As in the past, the performance of HarperCollins is too modest to merit any mention in the earnings release.
In the publishing segment, focused on newspapers, sales fell 9 percent and operating income dropped by 43 percent, blamed on "lower advertising revenues at the Australian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business" as well as the closure of The News of the World.
In a brief statement, Harper said their best-performing units were Harper UK (publisher there of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones books) and Zondervan "which had strong increases over the same quarter in the prior year." The largest unit, Harper US, as well as other international units "had challenging comparisons to the prior year."
Most surprising, given the scant level of disclosure now, is that Harper says print product during the quarter (which ended December 31) comprised a big 90 percent of revenues worldwide, leaving only 10 percent for digital and audio.
Within that overall 10 percent figure was Harper UK's increasing ebook gains, now comprising 20 percent of the division's trade revenues for the period, according to ceo Victoria Barnsley's letter to staff. (Per longstanding tradition, Barnsley declares another "fantastic" quarter.) That 20 percent is way ahead of reporting UK peers, and well ahead of the 11% ebook sales reported last quarter, and the sub-10% ebook sales noted in the quarter before that. The Bookseller says that "Nielsen BookScan figures show Harper UK print revenues were up 2 percent year on year in the last quarter of 2011."
Worldwide, Harper has reported a variety of measures of digital sales in the past. In the last quarter, they disclosed print sales through "bricks and mortar retail" only, which were 77 percent worldwide and 71 percent in the US. (Message: most of our sales are still outside of Amazon.)

The quarter before that, the end of their fiscal year last summer, ebooks alone were 12 percent of sales in the US for the entire year, but no quarterly measure was provided. In the third quarter of the prior year, they did report actual ebook sales--which were 19 percent in the US, and 11 percent worldwide, or close to the level reported now.