Business Line
Mumbai, Jan 17: Independent News & Media Plc, publishers of The Independent newspaper and who now have a 26 per cent equity stake in Jagran Prakashan Ltd (JPL), would like to introduce an Indian language daily in South Africa. Today in Sify Finance
According to Gavin K O'Reilly, Chief Operating Officer, the Irish media major drew its strength from servicing diverse geographies, a truism therein being that growth would require tapping into languages other than English. "We are going to be language indifferent," he said, pointing out that only 6 per cent of the world's population spoke English.
In South Africa, a Zulu language newspaper, which the company had launched a few years back, has reached a circulation of 100,000 copies. "We are not prescribing solutions for any market. If a market wants a paper in a certain language, we are going to provide it," he added.
Given people of Indian origin being a sizable ethnic group in South Africa, there appeared market potential for an Indian language daily. "So, we may look at an Indian language newspaper in that country," O'Reilly said. He did not disclose which Indian language would find favour, but in JPL, the Irish company has a partner here that publishes the largest circulated Indian newspaper, Dainik Jagran.
O'Reilly said that the equity stake in JPL would function as both an investment and a move which provides operating synergies. The market potential resident in the world's second biggest population reading more newspapers with rising literacy, was high. Independent News & Media has had a 7-8 per cent growth in top line, but its traditional UK market has been flat, while Ireland has decelerated to a 5-6 per cent growth from the previous 14-15 per cent. The Australian market has been growing at 3-4 per cent, while South Africa has been moving faster at 15-20 per cent. "India blows all these figures out of the market," he added.
"We wanted to go in where the competition was less pronounced," he said of the shareholding picked up in a group publishing mainly in the Hindi language. Compared to that space in the Indian media, the market for English newspapers appeared intensely fought for despite a lower 4-5 per cent growth in advertisement spend for that segment compared to a near 40 per cent for language dailies.
On the operational side, synergies from the partnership included those on the procurement front (mainly newsprint sourcing), developing JPL's outdoor business and co-operation in editorial content. O'Reilly visualised two types of co-operation on the content side.
Independent News & Media (2004 revenue of roughly 1.8 billion euros) owns or has investments in some 170 newspapers globally, which naturally opened up the possibility of JPL contributing to the news pool with content from the Indian sub-continent. Two items that quickly emerge as candidates for coverage in this context would be cricket and news about the Indian film industry.
But JPL contributing to news flow was only one half of possible editorial synergy.
The common news pool created by all the newspapers at Independent News & Media was sizable - around 1,400 stories every week. This raw material held great scope for packaging and repackaging into a plethora of editorial products, particularly as specialised content.
O'Reilly saw an advantage for India when it came to handling English and felt this content churn could be effectively done from here. While such churning could evolve new titles, he also held forth the possibility of outsourcing some of the group's current editing work from India.
However, he did not quantify how much that could be, except to say that it won't be of any proportion that should worry staff back home.
Further, he conceded, the partnership with JPL should hopefully grow a small platform for launching a facsimile edition of The Independent in accordance with Government rules on the subject. "We are only talking of catering to the expatriate population and readers here who may want a premium paper. That's all,'' he said.