brightsolid reports growth in turnover as growth continues
brightsolid, the online publishing and technology group owned by DC Thomson & Co, the publishing company, has announced a 23% increase in turnover during the year to March 31st 2010 as the business continues to grow.
brightsolid focused on its two core growth areas; securing business services through its online technology division and the provision of internet based family history services through its online publishing division which includes its genealogy brands - findmypast.co.uk, 1911Census.co.uk and scotlandspeople.gov.uk (in partnership with General Register Office of Scotland). As the company continues to perform strongly, DC Thomson remains committed to its growth and as a result has converted £12.5m loans into equity. In October 2010, brightsolid also fully repaid a £5m loan to DC Thomson for the 1911 census digitisation project, illustrating its strong performance in the last financial year.
Chris van der Kuyl, CEO brightsolid, comments: “The business continued to go from strength to strength in the last financial year, as we focused on our core growth areas – online publishing and online technology. In particular our genealogy businesses continued to perform strongly, with the acquisition of new records and the successful launch of the 1911 census online.”
The online publishing business focuses on building innovative online businesses around people and places through its genealogy brands and has continued to build on its success. Findmypast.co.uk added a significant number of records, including the 36 million entries from the 1911 census and the remaining counties of the 1851 census together with images for the 1881 census, which created the most comprehensive UK census collection anywhere online.
The online technology business provides cloud and hosting services to the brightsolid Group and the wider marketplace. During the period the division re-focussed to specialise in providing private cloud services, enabling organisations to take advantage of utility computing in a secure and flexible way. The changes implemented resulted in several significant contract wins this year for cloud services and a major expansion of new business, a typical example being the installation of more than 5,000 e-mailboxes for staff and post-graduates at St. Andrews University. The division has also seen growth in existing customer contracts in both the public and private sectors.
The growth across both divisions, partially offset by an aggressive policy of dataset and related intangible asset amortisation, resulted in a gross profit rise of 12% compared to the previous year and an operating loss of £322k. This loss includes goodwill amortisation of almost £600k relating to the purchase of findmypast.com in October 2007.
Throughout 2010, brightsolid has continued to grow significantly and this is set to continue in 2011. It completed its acquisition of the Friends Reunited Group from ITV plc (March 2010), following clearance by the Competition Commission. The Group includes the Genes Reunited brand, which makes brightsolid one of Britain’s leading genealogy businesses, further enhancing its excellent reputation in this sector, and FriendsReunited Dating.
It has also announced significant project wins this year including securing a partnership with the British Library to digitise up to 40 million pages of newspaper archives over the next 10 years. The digitisation of the collection will mean that those people who haven’t previously been able to access the physical resource will now be able to access it online. In particular it will help the genealogy community bring to life how their ancestors lived.
