In an interview last week in The Independent, Gowers was even more upbeat, at least in the longer term. His career ambition before he retires is to make the FT the unchallenged global business newspaper.
'The Wall Street Journal is on the retreat whereas we're in the ascendant, and The New York Times' International Herald Tribune doesn't have such a strong franchise.
I think we have every chance,' says Gowers.
Well, up to a point. Losing 60,000 readers from the FT's full-price circulation over the past five years is a curious definition of 'ascendancy', and it is scarcely brilliant to have seen the paper's UK circulation hovering not far above the 100,000 mark in recent times. But little of this, if any, is Gowers' fault, and his optimism is entirely admirable.
The real question is about the severity of the structural issues facing the specialised business and financial press.
Every time a banker loses his job - and there have been plenty of those - the FT is likely to lose a purchaser, just as Reuters is likely to lose a screen subscription. And everyone knows that the advertising market for financial services is less than lively.
However, the tide could be starting to turn for the FT as private investors begin to return to the Stock Market and merger and acquisition activity starts to pick up. But you still hear disturbing stories, which imply that as the cycle turns, the recovery for the FT may not be as vigorous as it would have been in the past.
A leading City analyst from a blue-blood house confessed the other day that he didn't read the FT any more. Taking note of the puzzled reaction, he added by way of explanation: 'Why should I need an aggregator of 24-hour-old news when I have Breaking Views, Bloomberg and Reuters?'
Ironically, Breaking Views is the online comment service set up by the former head of the FT's Lex market analysis team, Hugo Dixon.
The analyst still buys a daily paper, but it is for the general things you need to know to be a member of society - the crimes, the scandals, the sport.
One eccentric analyst wouldn't keep Andrew Gowers awake at night. But unfortunately, it goes further. The analyst is actually a director with a staff of 16 analysts under him. As an experiment, he asked how many of them had bought the FT that morning. Not one had. If anything like that is replicated elsewhere in the FT 's core City constituency, the problems it faces are great indeed.
A further chance anecdote involved a boutique finance house in New York.
Every day a pile of FTs arrives and more keep arriving, even though the company does not want them.
The underlying problem the FT faces is that its target readership - the international business people and financiers - are the very readers who have the greatest access to real-time information, and increasingly, real-time comment and analysis. As a result, the FT may be peculiarly vulnerable to the migration online, despite the efforts it has made with FT.com.
The argument now goes that the FT would flourish in the longer term as part of the empire of an online publisher or global information provider.
Luckily, if there is any merit in this argument, help is at hand. Gowers proclaims himself a great fan of Michael Bloomberg.
30 SECONDS ON... MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
- Bloomberg's career began with Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers (now Salomon Smith Barney) in 1966. Six years later he was made partner.
- Michael Bloomberg founded his financial information service in 1981 and is now reputedly worth $4bn. A philanthropist, Bloomberg sits on the boards of 12 charities whose remits range from protecting domestic violence victims to medical research.
- Bloomberg once said: 'There are days when you wake up and you read the newspapers and you want to shoot yourself. I'm always fascinated to find out where I was yesterday and what I said.'
- Despite harsh media criticism, Bloomberg became the 108th Mayor of New York in 2002. His financial savvy appealed to a post-9/11 electorate fearful of economic instability. Bloomberg is campaigning for a second term in office to be decided later this year.