BANGALORE: The world's second largest player in publishing technical articles with a 10 per cent global market share and the largest in books with a 25 per cent market share – Germany’s Springer Science Business to Business (SSB2B) is bullish on India.
SSB2B, one of the leaders in scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing is making its presence in India through two entities - Springer (India) in Delhi and Scientific Publishing Services in Chennai. Today, SSB2B CEO Haank announced that India would continue to play a strategic role in the STM market as well as in business process outsourcing.
Currently, 25 per cent of SSB2B's 5000 strong labour force is in India, and the company plans to increase India’s share to 50 per cent of their global projected work force over the next few years, even if this means job cuts for their European and American labor force. “We have not taken it upon ourselves to subsidise the German economy, we have a responsibility to our share-holders”, said Hank during a press conference in Bangalore.
Elucidating his reasons for the increased love for India, Hank said, “ Indian labor is cheaper than European, having similar or better skills, and the productivity, quality of output and speed is superior to the operations in Europe and the US. Indian labor costs just 35 per cent, even if you add another 35 per cent towards coordination, traveling, etc, India is still more cost-effective. Add to this the fact that 98 per cent of Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publication globally is in English, and with an Indian’s knowledge of English.”
SSB2B with revenues of about 1 billion Euros, of which 300 million Euros comes from the B2B and media business publications plan to start a media business publication in India. Currently all the 100 or so trade journals are in German.
SSB2B has 70 publishing companies in USA, Europe and Asia, with 1450 journals and over 4000 new books published every year.
Haank is very bullish about the internet too. He says “The Internet has revolutionised how everyone communicates and has accelerated the speed of scientific discovery. Among all of the publishing areas, scientific publishing has been the most affected by the Internet. In most cases, it has replaced paper – first with the advent of electronic journals, then with the digitisation of journal backfiles, etc. In the future, books, too, will be affected.”
He added, “Springer has been actively involved with the Indian digital library and other resource-sharing initiatives by providing globally acknowledged scientific and research content. Springer in India, is involved in networking of all the major research institutes, special libraries and engineering colleges to our global database platform, SpringerLink.
Some of the major consortia initiatives in India are UGC Infonet (University education), INDEST (Technical Education), CSIR (Industrial Research), ISI (Statistical Research), FORSAA (Physical Sciences Research) and TIFR (Research in Basic Science).
“Our vision is to provide a global forum for knowledge exchange in academic and professional publishing by fostering partnerships and co-publishing with societies and professional bodies to serve the information needs of the communities across the globe. India is also a part of our global initiative for developing countries”, concluded Haank.
