Pat McGovern on growing through the recession

IDG founder Pat McGovern gives an interesting interview at Mediashift about how his business is growing in tough times; the aggressive move online being at the heart of things in his opinion. There are inevitably a number of interesting references to China and India:

So have you launched any print publications lately?

McGovern: We're a global company, and in India print is hot, and only 3% of people have Internet access. The number of people learning English is developing nicely, and there are some other smaller countries where we have launched print publications. We launched ComputerWorld Pakistan recently. In the U.S., I don't see us launching print business publications. For consumer titles, in China, we publish about 20 print publications. We are the only international company able to publish magazines in China because we made an investment there before there was a prohibition on foreign investment.

There's now 450 million Internet users in China, more than the U.S., so the advertisers decided to shift ads from being 20% online to about 60% online, so we've seen a corresponding jump in online usage for our B2B titles.

McGovern also points to the massively larger number of mobile phones in India than mobile users to suggest that this medium may be more important than online as that market moves away from print. As regular readers of this blog will know, that's a point we've been banging on about for the past 2 years.

Thanks to Hugo E. Martin for pointing this interview out via a Facebook posting.