After touching three generations of Indian educated and intellectual community, S.Chand Group is now looking at both organic and inorganic growth
AABP: What about your digital publishing business?
Himanshu:Two years back, we entered into a joint venture with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt of USA, the largest K-12 publishing house with a networth of 12 billion dollars. The joint entity is called S. Chand Harcourt India Pvt. Ltd. to provide e-learning content for schools and learning centers. The content is developed for kindergarten to class XII in three subjects – Maths, Science and English. The content is very superior in quality and is customized and localized as per the Indian environment. Though we have started distributing content just 2-3 months back, we boast of bigwigs like the Welham Boys School in Dehradun, Indian High School in Dubai and 10 different schools in Delhi and North India. Our USP is better content quality and platform-independentness.
AABP : Which challenges do you see in the Indian publishing industry?
Himanshu: The Indian publishing industry is a family-managed home-grown industry. It is unorganized and still a cottage industry. Since it is an easy entry and exit business, non-competent people also join it, due to this, there is a cut throat unhealthy competition and the increasing credit facilities. Besides, the quality of employees is not upto the mark and most of the employees learn the skills on the job. There is still a dearth of people from the management stream opting for the publishing sector.
Moreover, the piracy of books is another nuisance for the publishing industry. To counter this, we have an anti-piracy cell in our organization which gets raids conducted regularly with the help of the local police. In the last one year, 8-10 raids have been conducted in different parts of the country.
I personally foresee a consolidation in the publishing industry in the next 5-10 years. A lot of foreign publishers are eyeing the Indian market and may go for acquisition. It would be a big challenge for Indian publishers to give better quality products at cheaper rates. However, they need to come together and fight jointly for a better cause.
AABP: How do you rate the book fairs held in India vis-à-vis abroad?
Himanshu:The Indian book fairs are more focused on the retail sale while the focus abroad is on exchange of new ideas, interchanging rights, conferences and selling of content. The focus of Indian book fairs also need to change to benefit the publishing industry at large.
AABP: Where do you foresee S. Chand & Company five years from now and what are your plans for that?
Himanshu:I foresee S. Chand & Company to be the number one publisher in the country in all categories. We are looking at Rs 500 cr publishing revenues by 2015 and are working towards it. We know that our organic growth cannot be more than 30% but with inorganic growth, we can turn the tables. For that, we are open for acquisitions of Indian publishing companies and buying rights of titles from overseas publishers.
For the time being, we wish to focus on the textbooks segment as per New Education Policies laid by government, only as there are quite a few gaps in the textbook market and we wish to tap them. Moreover, we have recently tied up with a well-known publisher in UK for 100 titles in Children Books. These are general books for children and we plan to get around 500-600 titles in the next 2-3 years.
We are also planning to open up our own outlets or showrooms in malls and high streets, where teachers, librarians and students can come and take a close look at our publications. This will not only create better awareness about our publications but also increase display and brand promotion.
With such futuristic plans in store, S. Chand & Company is steadily progressing towards the standards they have set up for themselves. And with both organic and inorganic growth plans in action, the company is bound to the reach their pinnacle.
-Varsha Verma
