‘Our Digital Content And Tools Are Growing Faster In India’

Corinne Saunders, CEO, Emerging & Developing Markets, Wolters Kluwer, talks to BW Businessworld about the company’s goals and strategies in India.

Excerpts:

Q: What does Wolters Kluwer do and how is it performing in India?
A: Wolters Kluwer is a global information services and publishing company headquartered in the Netherlands. It provides solutions on legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance and healthcare, and operates in over 150 countries. We started our operations in India at New Delhi office in 2006, and today we employ more than 750 people here and have multiple development centres supporting our global business units.

Q: What kind of opportunity you see in India?
A: The underlying trends are positive and we see an opportunity in all our segments. Say, in the healthcare sector, to address the staff shortages and skills gap, we see a strong need for medical training solutions; and to help improve patient outcomes and increase standard of treatment. Also, there is a need for tools like UpToDate — an evidence-based clinical decision support resource which is trusted worldwide by healthcare practitioners to make the right decisions while treating patients. And in the tax and accounting sector, with the recent legislative changes such as the Companies Act 2013 and the upcoming Goods & Services Tax, there is a need for high quality expert content to help accounting professionals perform their jobs.

Q: What is the outlook for Wolters Kluwer’s operations in India?
A: We have been active in the emerging and developing markets for years. Our largest high growth markets are Brazil, India and China, where the revenue base has tripled in the past five years. Since 2013, we are focussing more on high growth markets. Our goal is to evaluate and develop new strategies in the emerging and developing markets to accelerate organic growth, and identify alliances and inorganic opportunities to expand our footprint.

Q: What is the current status of your print-publishing aspect in India? How does it fare over China?
A: Today, over 80 per cent of our global revenues come from online and digital services. But we still have a strong print publishing business in India, especially in the health segment, where printed books and journals are growing in double-digits. Indian customers value print, especially students, who prefer textbooks rather digital reading. In the medical book market, 90 per cent students and 75 per cent institutions still rely on print. Our print market in India is more significant than China, where we have moved faster into the digital space due to software acquisitions such as Medicom and the development of the Chinese language version of UpToDate. Our digital content and tools in India are growing quickly, thanks to our online medical journals, UpToDate, and in the tax segment, the launch of accounting practice management software, iFirm.

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 14-12-2015)