Penguin working on expanding in India

Mumbai, Sep 29: The Penguin India is working on a three-pronged strategy to tap the ever growing book market in the country.

Talking to UNI on the sidelines of a book release here yesterday, the chairman of the company, John Makinson, said, ''We'll continue to develop educational publishing which includes the publication of the texts as prescribed by various educational institutions of the country''. Recently the publishing house has opened a development centre in Chennai for the purpose. Also, the company has its ambitious plans to employ 150 persons in its New Delhi office by next year.

In our second strategy to ensure our agessive growth in India, we want to develop contents for one of our most popular travel guide, he said.

Thirdly, the company is looking at outsourcing of technologies in forms like typesetting and others. Reasoning it, Mr Makinson said that It was all because the factor of combination of cost and service which was better in India when compared to other parts of the world.

Penguin India is one of the frontline operating companies of Pearson which has recently embarked on offshoring on a large scale.

Commenting about the Indian market he said, 'Our business here is about Rs 50 crore and our business was growing by 25 per cent every year in the country'. Also, we continue to be the market leader in the country's book publishing sector, he claimed.

It is more because the company launched its services in various Indian languages which include English, Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam. The company, which is 70 years old in the UK, will be celebrating two decades of its presence in India in near future.

The company has already made its foray in the publication of translated works by some of the leading Indian authors which include Khushwant Singh (from Hindi to English), Paul Zacharia (from Malayalam to English), Arundhati Roy (from English to Hindi), Suketu Mehta (from English to Marathi) and others.

The biggest growth in the Indian scenario as per Mr Makinson was shifting of its readers to non-fiction books. It was difficult for us to sell 10,000 books here, but now we are able to sell 70,000 books on subjects like Economics alone, he said.

UNI