China and India: an irresistible investment

Major forays by Equifax and OUP into India and China respectively have put emerging economies in the spotlight.

Equifax is to put in a joint bid with Indian research company Crisil and conglomerate Tata Capital to operate a credit information company.

Equifax is also actively looking at investing in China, Russia and Mexico.

Trey Loughran, senior vice president at Equifax, said: “We are taking a very careful fact-based approach to each market because when we enter a market we want to establish an information company not just a sales office. There is commitment on our part.”

At the same time Oxford Journals continues to expand its presence in China in a deal with the government-funded academic library consortium Chinese Academic Library and Information System (CALIS).

The agreement gives up to 600 CALIS institutions the option to subscribe to a package of 200 titles, and follows on from deals with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS).

James Mercer, Asia Pacific sales manager at Oxford Journals, said the deal had been in the pipeline a long time. “Our deals with CAS and CAAS may have helped demonstrate to CALIS the appeal of our journals to the Chinese research community,” he said.

Oxford Journals is the first publisher to strike a deal with CALIS since the consortium reformed its purchasing procedures in 2006.

Previously publishers seeking a deal had to negotiate with only one of CALIS’ central libraries, but things are now more complicated, according to Young Cui, deputy director of Oxford Journals China.

Young explained: “With the reformation of the purchase procedure, every publisher needs to talk with a group of usually four to six libraries to conclude the deal. The publisher should then meet with these libraries regularly to talk about the deal, and since there are more libraries involved, and everyone has different interests and requests, it is very difficult to reach a deal quickly.

“Oxford Journals has been very successful to reach the deal at such speed and become the first new publisher to get the deal after the reform.”

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