Off line - heading to New Mexico

I am taking three weeks in the US with my family. The first two weeks of that will be in Santa Fe, New Mexico which is (a) a wonderful city and (b) a more striking contrast to Hong Kong being hard to imagine.

I will, sadly, be having to check e-mail as I travel, but I shall not be blogging.

So, back later in August.

ACP unloads ETF to AAV

A prize for anybody who knows what that alphabet soup means without reading the rest of this. If you live in Sydney you may have a better shot at it.

ETF is Exhibitions & Trade Fairs, one of the longer-established exhibition businesses in Australia. It was acquired by the Packer organisation's ACP magazine publishing business four years ago and has now been sold on to the AAV Group's Staging Connections subsidiary for a reported A$13 million (US$9.93 million).

AAV CEO Michael Gardner is saying this is likely to be the first such acquisition in Australia and in other international locations.

Thanks to friend and former colleague, Daryl Herbert, CEO of one of Australia's most interesting exhibition and events companies, Definitive Events, for pointing me in the direction of this one.

More news from India

We noticed two interesting pieces on India day browsing Contentsutra.com. The first was a piece headlined "A Third Of eBay India Sellers Use Auction Portal As Their Main Source Of Income". This apparently relates to 12,800 individuals and small companies. Commenter Shirin notes that "other sites have entered the auction/classifieds arena as well. Bechna.com is the newcomer. Others include PriceIndia.com/Keemat.com, Nilaami.com". He estimates, however, that eBay accounts for over 95% of the market.

In the more structured sector, Cybermedia has reported net profits up 23% in its first quarter. Revenues were up 25% at Rs15.45 crores (US$3.3 million). Highlight was a 47% increase in online revenues which, although still small at Rs1.48 crores (US$317,000) are clearly growing very quickly.

Director from India for UBM

We spoke yesterday of United Business Media's strong 1H results. We note with interest today on Contentsutra.com that the company has just appointed Pradeep Kar to its board. The report notes that Kar was founder of Planetsia.com and Indya.com and is now chairman of IT infrastructure outsourcing firm Microland.

UBM, under relatively new CEO David Levin is focusing serious attention on India with both CMP Asia and CMP Medica pushing hard to establish a viable presence there. We noted in September last year as well, CMP Media (from the US) tying up with Cybermedia on outsourcing media projects.

Kathmandu trade fair

I have come across trade fairs in some challenging places but today's People's Daily points me to the first I have come across in Nepal. The China Trade Fair will be staged in September at the Birendra International Convention Center by CCPIT's Machinery Sub-Council and the Nepal-China Executives Council (NCEC).

After show tour to Everest anybody?

CMP reports solid 1H growth in Asia

United Business Media has just reported its first 6 months with revenues - driven by acquisition boosts - up over 25%. Good for them.

CMP Asia reported underlying revenues and profits both up by around 8 - 9%, a pretty solid performance. At current exchange rates, its GBP26.5 in first revenues translate to a hair under $50 million. With several big trade fairs scheduled for September and October, we may see it push full year revenues past the $100 million level.

The company says that growth in Asia was "driven principally by the growth of the exhibitions in Hong Kong, China and Japan". It goes on to note "We are investing in China, India and in new online media products to increase our presence in higher growth markets. We have opened an office in Mumbai, India and are launching new events. We continue to seek expansion opportunities and in the first half announced our intention
to acquire a majority share in the Guangzhou Beauty Fair (China)".

Full disclosure: as a former employee of what was then Miller Freeman Asia, I maintain a small block of UBM share so watch them with more than the usual care and attention.

CNET in $10mn auto site acquisition in China

I'm not sure how solid the details of these reports are but it appears that CNET has acquired XCAR in China for a rumoured $10 million. CNET's Q2 announcement released two days ago confirms the acquisition but not the price.

As a tech media player, CNET is one of those companies which hovers in the neverland between B2B and B2C. A quick glance would suggest that XCar falls for now mainly into the latter category. It will be interesting to see which way CNET takes it. It will also be interesting to see how the deal is structured as there are restrictions on foreign ownership of Internet Content Providers in China which roughly mirror those affecting print publishers.

Update: there's a bit more about this now on China Stock Blog which quotes CNET Chairman and CEO Shelby Bonnie saying "Xcar, which is based in Beijing, is one of the top-three properties related to the auto industry in China. Xcar is dedicated to news, reviews and information regarding the auto market in China. The site is a mix of both original and user-generated content, as well as a rich database of car and related product information."

Declining traditional media revenues in China

Fons Tuinstra points in his China Herald blog to a China Daily piece which highlights falling traditional media revenues in the mainland. Fons quotes the piece saying "Newspaper ads sales fell by 5.1 per cent in 2004, and by 16.5 per cent in magazines compared with an average growth of 20 per cent in the previous 20 years" and adds his comment that this is "partly due to the emergence of the internet, but also because Chinese have better things to do than read, watch those boring media".

I think it is now crystal clear that those publishers looking at China as the last chance to launch traditional print media are at great risk of missing the digital boat which is now seriously setting sail.

Baidu hype Round 2

Seconds away... The Wall Street analysts are obviously getting bored as the summer months creep by. Perhaps they live in Queens and are stuck in the dark.

China Stock Blog reports that some people now think that Baidu is reasonably priced and is looking like a good buy. Ho Ho.

I realise that Google isn't popular right now, but wouldn't count it out in China just yet.

Datamonitor in Japan acquisition

We have been talking about the steadily-increasing number of transactions in Japan across the business media and information industry. So, we note with interest the latest, Datamonitor's aquisition of Japanscan announced in late June. The company announcement is as follows:

Datamonitor acquires Japanscan business and assets

Posted on 6/27/2006

We are very pleased to announce that on Friday 16th June, Datamonitor acquired the business and assets of Japanscan Ltd.

Datamonitor has enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with Japanscan for several years, with Japanscan supplying new product details to Datamonitor’s Productscan Online database.

Japanscan is a highly respected brand and a leading authority on new product data for the food and drink processing market in Japan. The combination of Japanscan’s expertise with Datamonitor’s reach and content in other consumer market areas, provides a great opportunity for us to expand coverage of the Japanese market.

The owner of Japanscan will continue to work with Datamonitor under the management of the consumer team.