Malditah Musings

Publishing and Media Offshoring: The Philippine Advantage

Subcontracting work to offshore locations is becoming an increasingly common practice of publishing top and media firms. Although it is true ITES (Information Technology enabled services) has given the company a way of boosting profitability significantly by lower production costs and making the offshore location, certainly it is not just about cutting costs. A closer look at the current context of publishing and media industry shows that, by offshoring, quality of output is never compromised the ability of vendors to invest in new products and innovations.

In the past, many companies publishing is not comfortable with the idea to send their work to third party providers; explaining why offshoring will slowly descend to earth in publishing and media sectors. With technological innovations of a new landscape where media consumption trends are increasingly confident in the digital product. The growth of offshoring industry is paralleled trends. Where once vendors are committed only as far as low-end services such as copyediting and tagging, industry has advanced to involve higher-end creative services such as ad campaigns and design and test e-learning tools.

Offshoring deal is increased in the last 18 months; namely to Asian destinations such as India, Vietnam and the Philippines. This is mainly due to mergers and the increasing pressures of market information drive the need for innovation and lower costs.

As of 2008, offshore pre-press services offered by the countries in this region is reported that costs approximately $ 780 million. Following the success of the offshoring story top ranking publishing and media companies, other companies are now looking to investigate the full potential of ICT.

In general, media companies are slower than other industries to take up alternative sourcing. However, many new entrants to the industry is seen as more and more companies under economic pressure realize the benefits of offshoring relationship. Trend is necessitated many new innovations to the ability to deliver services, to make the publishing and media sector very exciting indeed.

Publishing sector in the Philippine BPO industry is approximated to $ 130 million this year. It consists of 20-25 vendors with a strong focus on STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing, and a current shift experienced in education and corporate publishing segments. The Philippine workforce is proving itself increasingly so for higher value services as seen the proliferation of service providers now offer end-to-end service. We follow a 20-30% yearly growth of medium to large publishing vendors. SPi Global Solutions, Innodata Isogen, Inc. and Asiatype are among the vendors and is around for at least two decades.

The main target of the publishing industry is advertising for the affordability of qualified resources in graphic design and copywriting. In fact, O & OC offshoring is involved in such relationships where the buyer saved up to 60% of operating costs.

The advantage for the ITES industry publication remains the same: reducing the cost and the ability to focus on core activities – in the fields of publishing, such work is the choice of content, financing and marketing, non-core activities such as editorial and production related to care activities by service providers. The current growth of the Philippine publishing industry is proof that fully reaping the benefits of such a situation is very much within arms reach of any buyer.

To remain competitive and increase shareholder value, traditional fixed costs should be variable cost – which is exactly what outsourcing is doing. By using the services of a third party service provider, customers are given a larger volume production without the need for traditional editorial and production infrastructure. This means increased flexibility and faster response the needs of customers. Now a lot of qualified suppliers in the Philippines with a variety of delivery models. Now the issue becomes: if how they are different from each other and where the supplier makes the best sense for me? Media company now has a lot of good choices. They have to match their needs with the options.

Under the right guidance, publishing and media companies use vendors are registered in the Philippines saving between 35% and 70%. As pressure mounts to publishers, effective use offshore service providers are more than a viable alternative. Because high experienced consultants to O & OC, we understand exactly how to maximize the benefits of outsourcing anything from the composition of pre-press services and we are happy to extend our expertise in this matter.

About the Author

Rafael Verheij is the founder and CEO of O&OC;Company Limited, http://www.oandoc.com, a global advisory company offering unbiased advice and assistance on outsourcing and offshoring to the Philippines.