India: Lexis Nexis Looks To Expand Via Acquistions

Nothing new here – so… who are they buying?

The Indian Economic Times reports

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/media/entertainment/media/lexisnexis-eyes-acquisitions-to-expand-in-india/articleshow/51864321.cms

NEW DELHI: LexisNexis, a leading global publisher and online solutions provider for legal, tax and academic content, is “very bullish” on India and is keen on expanding in the country through acquisitions while tapping entrepreneurs and successful businesses here.

Part of Reed Elsevier group, LexisNexis Legal & Professional serves customers in more than 175 countries with 10,000 employees worldwide.

In June last year, the global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions acquired Delhi-based Universal Law Publishing and is open to do “dozen and dozens” of critical add-on acquisitions across the world including in India.

“And because Indian market is one of those markets that we are very bullish on, its natural that the list includes several Indian entrepreneurs or Indian successful businesses so you will hear about more acquisitions,” Youngsuk ‘YS’ Chi, Chairman, Elsevier told PTI in an interview here.

“We are not promising that they would happen in the first quarter or this year but we are constantly observing,” he said.

Last year, LexisNexis had bought Delhi-based Universal Law Publishing, which has been publishing legal books for legal professionals, academics and students for the past five decades and some of its writers include retired justices V R Krishna Iyer and P N Bhagwati and legal eagle Soli Sorabjee, among others.

Asked about whether there are any more acquisitions in the pipeline, he said: “We always have wishlist. we don’t do a single transformational acquisition. However, we would love to do dozen and dozens of critical add-on acquisitions across the world, that enhances our standing”.

Chi, Chairman of one of the world’s biggest professional publishing and information solutions company, was here on a visit to India.

He said India is going to be quite promising for a while.

Asked about the outlook of the local publishing industry, Chi, who was also the immediate Past President of the International Publishers Association said, the domestic publishing industry is “very strong”.

“It is an industry that few from outside who don’t know India can really understand how big it is. There are many many small players. That is very advantageous for a country with multiple culture, multiple languages, huge geographies and many many verticals and at some point of time there has to be some consolidation,” he added.