The BPO no one talks about

Publishing outsourcing is rapidly growing

If Vinay K Singh, general manager at Thomson Digital's headquarters in Noida near Delhi, is tense about the outcome of the company's recent bid for British Library business in the UK, he doesn't show it. "I'm sure others also must have pitched for the contract to digitise and archive the last 300 years' newspapers at the library," he says.

Singh is keeping his fingers crossed and praying that Thomson Digital, the Rs 50 crore overseas business division of Aroon Purie's Thomson Press, wins the contract. If it does, it will the first of its kind in the company's 15-year history of publishing outsourcing.

As Singh waits for the outcome, the Macmillan India office in Bangalore is popping the champagne corks. It has won a major overseas contract from a Yellow Pages company in the US.

Says Macmillan's director (technical) Debasish Banerjee: "We are composing nearly 4,000 ads a day for a Yellow Pages publisher. The number will increase to nearly 6,000 in the next three to four months."

Banerjee says the Yellow Pages market in the US is huge "� it produces nearly 600 different publications a year, often twice "� and offers big outsourcing opportunities.

Not only is a new kind of publishing business being outsourced to India but the volume of original outsourcing jobs is growing. The publishing outsourcing industry is worth about Rs 1,000 crore, growing by a 35-40 per cent annual clip. The beneficiaries are the over 25 publishing houses, including SR Nova, Cipha, Macmillan, Scientific Publishing and Thomson Digital, located in Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore.

"Quietly operating in India for the last 15 years, publishing outsourcing is nothing new. It is the unsung BPO," says Singh.

That may be because publishing initially did not look like a BPO operation, Singh explains. It was skill-based work, mostly typesetting. Today, it is IT-enabled, he says.

Agrees Ernst & Young partner Ranjan Biswas: "The genesis of publishing BPO was typesetting. Between then and now, technology has played a major role."

Sunil Garde, chief operating officer at Techbooks in Delhi, says that publishing is a high-end technology BPO that involves digitising content. The services on offer are: XML files (tagging and footers), copy editing, electronic data processing, data conversion, electronic publishing and IT-enabled services and archiving.

Companies are also starting to offer project management services. Here, while the content is provided by multinational clients, the rest of the work (co-ordinating with the author, publisher and the printer) is handled by Indian companies.

"Digitising content for the printer or web-enabling it for an internet edition, art and design work, graphics, charts and illustration "� we do it all here," says Singh.

Biswas believes that the toplines of 15-20 companies in this segment are growing by 30-50 per cent. "The quality levels are to the extent of 99.97 per cent and the companies have a gross profit margin of 60-70 per cent," he says.

In the last five years, publishing companies in India have serviced major publishers in Europe "� Blackwell, Elsevier Science, John Wiley & Sons, Reed Business and the Pearson group, among others. The majority of the work has been in the STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) journal area.

Predictably, India is being tapped because it is 25 to 60 per cent cheaper to get the work done here. India's vast English speaking population and the country's strides in software technology have also helped.

Today, nearly 70-80 per cent work comes from Europe. But now even the US is waking up to the benefits of outsourcing to India. Companies such as Thomson Digital and Techbooks (set up by NRIs in the US in 1988) are expecting a lot of business from the US colleges and universities. Techbooks has tie-ups with the Cambridge and Oxford University Press and is now getting active in Boston.

Despite the enormous potential, the going's not that easy. The biggest challenge is upgrading staff skills. "The quality of education in the country is an issue. Though we find English-speaking people, we have to train them for at least one year to bring them up to our requirements," says Singh.

Secondly, the industry has no regulatory association to represent its interests. "Many IT guys are getting into the business. They have no expertise and are resorting to massive price cuts," says Singh.

The government is doing nothing to check fly-by-night operators, complain others. Companies fret that if shoddy work is turned out, foreign publishers will start moving business to China, which is leaving no stone unturned to promote English. "China is no threat today, but we cannot say about tomorrow," says Techbooks' Garde.

Last but not least, a few international publishers are setting up base here. Springer of Germany is here. So is the US-based Cadmus, which has formed a joint venture with Datamatics to set up Knowledge Works Global Ltd. The Dublin based Datapage, too, has opened an office in Chennai.

Back in Noida, Thomson Digital's Singh can only pray that increased competition won't jeopardise his bid for British Library business.