Prayatna

Indian publisher, Navneet, acquires Grafalco, a Spanish publishing business

Navneet Publications, an Indian publishing house, is going global and their strategy seems to be very interesting. Rather than going after the English market, they are going after the Spanish market.

Indiainfoline.com reports (June 29, 2005),

Navneet Publications India Ltd. said on Wednesday that it has acquired the publishing business of Spain's Grafalco along with its brand name for Euro 459,000 (Rs. 2.4 Crores). Chaplin Disenos SL, the company's 100% subsidiary in Spain has acquired tangible and intangible assets, mainly intellectual property rights from Grafalco and majority of the titles acquired are in Spanish.

Grafalco, established in 1985, is a profit making children's book publishing company in Spain. It publishes different kinds of colouring books, sticker books, activity books and story books. During the last three years, Grafalco had average annual revenues to the tune of Euro 2mn.

Navneet Publications' Annual Report 2004-2005 states

Your company has acquired the publishing business and a popular brand in Spain namely "Grafalco" from a Spanish Company, by way of of an acquisition of tangible and intagible assets, mainly intellectual property rights for a sum of EURO 459,000. The Company has initiated operations from the existing infrastructure of that Company in Spain through a wholly owned subsidiary floated by your Company in Spain.  The Company intends to tap market of the Spanish speaking community across the world. The Company believes to have better footage for its existing product range in Europe, having established a base in that continent.

The acquisition is a strategic move to enter Europe for publishing business of children's books.

Out of  sales of  Rs. 274 Crores in FY ending March 2005, Rs. 228 Crores (83%) was in India. The next biggest chunk of Rs. 25 Crores (9%) was in North and Central America.

According to Wikipedia, the most spoken languages are

Chinese: 1.3 billion
English: 940 million speakers (340 million first language and 600 million second language)
Spanish: 417 million (330 million first language and 87 million second language)
Hindi: 480 million (180 million first language and 300 million second language)

The large number of Spanish speakers around the world and Navneet's sizeable sales to the North and Central American markets (where a large chunk of Spanish speakers are present) seem to be driving Navneet's strategy of expanding abroad with Spanish. It will be interesting to see how they fare.

Update: I found some information on the number of speakers of all major Indian languages

CNET's new home page design

[Via E-Media Tidbits] CNET has unveiled its new beta home page design http://beta.news.com.com. It has a superb user interface, with lots of functionalities which aren't obvious at first look.

• move your mouse over the various headlines under "Top headlines" - and the photograph at the left changes appropriately to something related to the headline/story.
• look at (and click on) the "previous" and "next" buttons alongside the Daily Spotlight section - to see more articles within the same screen.
• click on one of the top headlines and go to the article page (say this headline titled $100 laptop moves closer to reality) - and then scroll down and look below the ad on the right. There's a very interesting visual way of presenting What's Hot - the most interesting (by size of the box) and most recent headlines (by colour of the box). But one can also switch to the plain old text headlines at a click.
• click on the the "Big Picture" "Related Stories" and the "Surprise Me" links just above the visual representation of "What's hot" - for instance, if you click on "Big Picture" for the $100 dollar laptop story, a graphic loads to present the perspective view of how this story is linked to various other related stories/developments and one can shift the focus to one of the other stories or go on to read any of those actual stories.

Ajax at work? Also see Mediaweek's piece on CNET's new home page design.