Hachette India climbs to second place

Hachette India is beating its own financial expectations, after a strong year of sales has seen it soar into place as the second-largest trade publisher in the country by value terms.

Managing director Thomas Abraham said 2009’s turnover - roughly R270m (£3.6m) - was now the second biggest in India, having surpassed both HarperCollins and Random House. Penguin remains the biggest publisher, having generated a turnover of more than double Hachette's.

“We didn’t expect to be number two after our first full year... We thought we would have a good year, but we expected that to be three years away," said Abraham.

“It will take a long time for anyone else to catch up [with Penguin], but we wil get there,” he added.

Between 17-18% of the publisher’s sales came from “a nice little bit of luck called Stephenie Meyer”. But Abraham emphasised the wide range of titles that had contributed to the overall increase.

The local publishing list contributed two big sellers “by Indian standard”: My Friend Sancho by Amit Varma and the Children’s Infopedia & Yearbook. “They were our two flagship sellers, selling more than 15,000 each,” Abraham explained. Sleeper hits included Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters and Quantum by Manjit Kumar.

“Local publishing provided much needed fillip to the fact that the Hachette list is being established for the first time,” he said.

The previous year had been “really horrid”, with parts of the market down as much as two-thirds in the autumn of 2008. “It remained pretty bad until May [2009], when we saw a turnaround, and from there it just took off,” said Abraham.

He explained this was not solely as a result of the wider recession, but problems with “systems and distribution” that had affected all local publishers.

For the year ahead, Abraham is planning a number of pushes, launching the Everyman Classics and reviving the classic cover editions of Enid Blyton books to appeal to “the throwback market”, as well as building Linwood Barclay, Jeffery Deaver, Mark Billingham and others into strong brand-name authors.

The company, which is part of Hachette UK, is now “just about close to breaking even”, with Abraham expecting to post a profit at the end of 2010. “We are more or less following the path we set ourselves, but in value terms we are finishing about 10-12% above where we thought we would. I suspect it will be better than we expected when we drew up our three-year plan.”