The publishing world's quiet achiever nets Microsoft deal.(Brief Article)

Chris Anderson is leading Future Publishing to the lop of the game. By Lucy Hone

The boys from Bath were back in the headlines last week, having secured a contract for the biggest international magazine launch the world has ever seen.

The Future Network's deal to publish Microsoft's official Xbox gaming magazine globally is yet another chapter in a company history that includes a sale to Pearson, a management buyout, flotation and the installment on the board of Elisabeth Murdoch.

Presiding over the Future Network is Chris Anderson, its founder and chairman, who at the age of 43 employs 2,000 people worldwide and publishes more than 130 magazines and 56 web products. With an estimated 140 [pounds sterling] million made personally from last year's London stock market flotation, this shy man now ranks 104th in The Sunday Times's rich list.

It wasn't always this way, though. For years Anderson and his Bath-based magazine company was regarded by the London-centric media world as a joke. He might have metamorphosed from a 28-year-old Oxford graduate working out of a garage in 1985 to Britain's fastest growing publisher by the early 90s, but critics refused to be impressed by a portfolio that included titles such as Cross Stitch and Good Woodworking.

All that changed in 1994, when Anderson sold 93 per cent of Future Publishing to Pearson New Entertainment for 52.7 million [pounds sterling] -- only to buy it back as part of a 142 million [pounds sterling] management buyout four years later. When last June's stock exchange flotation came around, the "anorak" publishing house, launched on a 5,000 [pounds sterling] bank loan, was valued at 578 million [pounds sterling].

For Anderson, though, the Microsoft agreement is the big one. "I don't claim the credit for the deal," he says with customary modesty, "but the vision of an international media company that can do this kind of deal is what we have been planning since we amalgamated my US company Imagine Media into Future and floated last year."