Offshoring in the Publishing Vertical: Growing vendor maturity

Friday, 04 May 2007

Recent findings from a detailed study on publishing offshoring indicate that - Industry revenues for Indian offshoring stand at $440 million in 2006. The publishing offshoring space in India comprises over 100 vendors of various sizes, which employed around 26,000 people in 2006.

The Vendor Landscape

Our research has identified a minimum of 28 "credible" vendors in the publishing offshoring space. These can be divided into five clusters based on various characteristics:

Vendor groups	Traits	Vendors
Cluster 1	Employees >2000. Offshore presence in other countries also.	Innodata Isogen, Lason, OfficeTiger, SPi
Cluster 2	Employees >1000. More focused on STM and Educational publishing. Cater primarily to publishers.	Macmillan, Aptara (formerly TechBooks), Thomson Digital, SPS
Cluster 3	Employees <1000. Focused primarily on STM publishing.	Alden, Integra, Integreon, KnowledgeWorks Global, TnQ, Laserwords, Newgen
Cluster 4	Employees <500 Focused on STM publishing. Often get sub-contracted work.	Premedia Global, Infomedia, DPS, IBH, SR Nova, QPRO, Mizpah, Lapiz, Diacritech
Cluster 5	Employees <500. Focused on high end services in content design space in Educational publishing	Q2A Solutions, CyberMedia Services

Source: "Offshoring in the Publishing Vertical - An Update" - A report by ValueNotes

A vast majority, or 96% of the India-based vendors have capabilities to service the STM/Academic publishing segment. About 56% and 39% of the vendors have the capability to handle educational publishing and legal publishing respectively. The range of offshored services includes: Editorial, Data (operations), Design, Training and IT. In the Indian offshoring space, the strongest vendor capability is within the Operations space, followed by Editorial services.

Going Forward

By 2010, the Indian publishing offshoring revenues are expected to reach $1.46 billion and the industry will employ about 76,000 people. Over the last couple of years, Publishing offshoring revenues have grown faster than estimated and employees have grown slightly slower than estimated in the previous report by ValueNotes. This demonstrates the increasing level of automation and shift to higher value services. Companies are rapidly adding high-end service capabilities and this will enable them to bill higher rates in an era of intense competition, margin pressures and Rupee appreciation. Going forward, newer high-growth niches in educational and legal segments will continue to provide opportunities for vendors to enhance their revenue mix towards higher value services.

This article is based on the newly released ValueNotes report: "Offshoring in the Publishing Vertical: An Update". The report provides an in-depth information and analysis of the Indian vendor space along with vendor profiles of all major and upcoming players in the STM/Academic, Educational and Legal Publishing segments.

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