India is flavour of the day

It's not just because I've just been there and have it in my mind: almost everything I've opened this morning has had something about India. This includes, with a publishing focus:

• Crain's B2B online reports from ABM's Spring Meeting in Naples, Florida. Chandu Nair, the president of Scope e-Knowledge Center, reportedly told attendees that “ABM members have a big role to play” in developing business content in India. The industry is poised for growth.”
• Meanwhile, over at FIPP, as they gear up for next week's World Magazine Congress in Beijing, the World Magazine Update newsletter points to a story on their website regarding exchange4media's plans "to provide comprehensive information on the Indian magazine industry including resources, players, their standing in the industry, and the nature of advertising done in various magazine products". The report, to be titled ‘Ready Reckoner’ will, the FIPP story says, be released along with the May 2007 issue of Pitch, an e4m publication.

ABM China Focus

It's good to see American Business Media keeping up its focus on China. Following last year's Leadership Tour the much livelier MediaPace blog devotes an in-depth posting to the subject today. As well as recapping some of the key developments in magazine publishing, she talks of their involvement in last week's CEFCO through Claudia Flowers' moderating of the M&A session as well as noting a little healthy scepticism about just how open the door is to foreign investment.

I have added a comment to the piece reminding Sara about the tremendous potential for B2B online in this market as well. With new figures showing that Internet users now top 137 million, 50 million+ of them with broadband access, the potential for aggressive online-only strategies combined with wholly-owned face-to-face must be very attractive to many B2B companies.