“Journalism is, in fact, history on the run.”
-Tom Griffith, American TV presenter

The economy of India, the world’s second-most populous nation and the biggest democracy, is on the travelator. And, barring the rare fatigue, is zipping. India’s trade and political Press are struggling to keep pace and unwrapping investment opportunities in a sector that is considered – at best – stagnant in most parts of the developed world. Placecomms, welcome to India’s Print Media industry!

An Overview: India’s print media, which typically enjoys the highest credibility and offers the strongest opportunity for alliances with overseas trade and business media, is a $4.5-billion market, expanding at 14.8% CAGR.

Indian Print Media companies attract some of the country’s best marketing minds

The pace of revenue growth, albeit a tad slow in the past 15 months, is expected to maintain the earlier noted CAGR in the next four years. A revival in GDP growth, rising incomes and higher disposable cash, improving literacy, sustained ad-rate increase, an increasing share of higher-value color advertising in the total pie, increasing brand consciousness and consumerism in smaller towns and semi-urban areas are the multiple drivers of revenue growth through 2012.

True, India too has been buffeted by the economic headwinds that have caused global economies to deep-dive; however, India’s pain is presumably short-lived. India’s GDP accelerated to 7.9% in the fiscal second quarter, the fastest rate since March 2008, indicating that internal consumption has cushioned the blow and primed the economy for a faster lift-off when the world economy turns the corner.

Low ad to GDP ratio and increasing consumerism will strengthen the Print Media, which is shriveling elsewhere. Companies are hungry for talent and are willing to experiment

Among the drivers likely to provide traction to advertising revenue growth are glossy and color ads; these typically are 30-50% more profitable than B&W ads and their share in the increasing advertising pie is rising in line with a higher share of advertising in the GDP. At 0.34% of GDP, India’s advertising revenue relative to the size of its economy is small but the share is rising; if it were to reach the level of even competing regional economies, the print media will attract a significant portion of the additional revenue to itself by virtue of its primacy in the news, current affairs, economic and political analytics space. Furthermore, coupled with the traction in colored advertising, increasing consumerism and rising affordability quotients in India’s semi-urban centers and smaller towns should ensure advertising revenue CAGR of 16.8% until 2013.

The Peculiarities of Indian Media: India, arguably, swears by the so-called Sober English Press. Regional languages, which are numerous in India – and Hindi, the national language, together have a 25% share each in the Indian advertising revenue pie, despite their clear leadership in circulation and readership. English newspapers command higher advertising yields and more than half the share of the advertising pie. While increasing urbanization will help eventually narrow the gap, bigger Indian media houses are evenly distributed in their risk profiles; for circulation and distribution presence, they have a strong repertoire of regional assets, relying on profits on the more serious, business-oriented and thematically national English assets.

Print Media Growth Estimates

[Potential recruiters of Lateral MBA graduates and the industry’s competitive positioning will follow in the next post]

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 7:21 pm and is filed under GMAT in India, MBA interview topics, One-year MBA, PGPEX, Spotlight, industry overview, placements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.