Currently, the offshore vendor market is at a nascent stage with only a handful of vendors in India actively focusing on the newspaper segment. The total offshore manpower employed in the newspaper outsourcing industry was approximately 2300, as of July 2008. The overall revenues of the industry offering services to the newspaper segment (including to the US and the UK) are estimated at $35 m in 2008. Affinity Express, Express KCS, 2AdPro and Mindworks Global are the industry frontrunners. Given the current lacuna of ‘end-to-end’ service capability amongst vendors, we expect the early entrants to grab this slot. Vendors are expected to build complementary capabilities to achieve this objective. Says Jaslene Bawa, analyst ValueNotes, “We expect Indian offshore revenues from the global newspaper market to reach $120 m by 2012. However the vendors need to build client confidence in terms of delivering consistently good quality of output and quick turnaround.”

The offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 b. The estimated Indian offshoring to the newspaper publishers at $35 m in 2008 highlights the huge untapped potential. Significant opportunity exists across the service chain for existing vendors as well as new entrants. According to Aradhana Kolhatkar, analyst ValueNotes, “Traditional publishing BPOs, Indian graphic design firms and Indian newspaper publishers are well poised to grab the opportunity; however they will need to tool themselves with new skill sets to service the global newspaper publishers”.

The ValueNotes report, “Offshoring by US Newspaper Publishers” provides information and analysis of the US newspaper Industry and a detailed analysis of the Indian service provider landscape. The report is designed to help:

The report is based on secondary data as well as extensive interviews with key people at various outsourcing companies in India and industry experts in the US.