The State of Sourcing

Some recent news on the Indian publishing scene inspired me to explore how the market is emerging in the trade category, especially in the English language.

• The Tata Group is aggressively focusing on their book publishing business. The company aims to be amongst the top five in India within the next three years.
• Penguin India has chosen one of the most popular Indian writers, Shobhaa Dé, to acquire a new line of books for the publishing house. The imprint – Shobhaa Dé Books – to be released in 2011 will cater to an urban English speaking audience.
• Penguin-India has been recording approx. 25% growth in sales. Random House, Harper Collins, Rupa and some others have been increasing their titles each year.

Outsourcing destination! That’s the foremost identity while referring to ‘India’ and ‘publishing’ together. India has emerged as a key destination for sourcing publishing services for US and UK based publishers for over two decades. But publishers viewing India as a potential market ? – It’s a different ballgame!

Continue reading ‘India: From a service hub to a potential market?’ »

As you may be aware, following the release of the ValueNotes e-learning offshoring report, we held an executive briefing to discuss the key findings with members of the industry, and also to facilitate Indian e-learning buyer-vendor interactions. The result was phenomenal, as Deepali blogged about earlier.

What we didn’t expect was the great response to the ValueNotes industry presentation, an integral part of the event. Since we’re still getting requests, we thought we should share a few of the slides with interested parties in the Indian e-learning space. And what better place to do so than our blog!

Continue reading ‘e-learning outsourcing 2009: Advantage India’ »

Quality of work, data security and cultural differences are the key concerns for companies offshoring their market research activities. This is one of the findings of a research study by ValueNotes titled, “Market Research Outsourcing – Buyer Survey”.

Quality of work and data security are concerns for all services that are being offshored, including data collection, data processing, data analysis & analytics, report writing, panel services and project management.
Interestingly, a discussion with a senior manager of a global market research firm revealed an interesting fact echoed by other full service research companies and field work and tabulation companies. According to him, clients prefer to outsource data collection work to local companies.

To illustrate, a Singaporean client would get skeptical about offshoring his Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) process to a company in India who would be calling guys in Singapore and Hong Kong for information on their shopping preferences.

Continue reading ‘Cultural differences keeping data collection clients at bay’ »