SCIENTIFIC, TECHNICAL & MEDICAL PUBLISHING IN ASIA

Authors: Paul Woodward, Analyst; Candice Siu, Analyst

The fast-growing markets of Asia are receiving substantial interest from STM publishers who are looking to grow their traditional ?export? businesses, selling international content to institutions in Asia at the same time as developing a much stronger flow of Asian content into their international titles and new titles dedicated to Asian interests.
Businesses are still typically headquartered in the mature, English-speaking markets although Japan is now usually the largest business in the region with development focus on China and India.
International publishers are trying to reduce their dependence on agents and distributors by setting up their own operations in as many markets as possible. By and large, they are averse to joint ventures.
Libraries are the main clients with corporate customers generally less important than in Europe and North America except in Japan where there is a solid base of them. Library budgets are tightening in countries like Australia and New Zealand while in Japan reducing student numbers are putting some universities under pressure to reduce costs. Budgets are yet to increase substantially in the key developing markets.
International publishers are trying to hold the line on maintaining global pricing models for their print products. On electronic pricing, however, there is much greater variation and several talk of lowered prices as they enter developing markets. We question the long term implications of this.
Although intellectual property abuse remains a concern for most of the publishers, they felt that things were beginning to improve, at least in China.
Most international publishers see the other international publishers as their key competitors. They do name a limited number of emerging (or, in one or two cases, well-established) domestic competitors. We briefly profile four of those competitors for this report.