Hyderabad: SPG Media India, the Indian subsidiary of the SPG Media Group Plc, UK, a $42-million international business-to-business media company, is increasing its focus on India. The UK company provides controlled circulation magazines, internet reference portals and engaged in the business of organising business conferences and forums, with offices in London and India.

The company, which delivers 130 different products and services across 14 industries in 85 countries, has been in India since 2003 and hopes to record a turnover $3 million this fiscal.

Since setting up operations the company's revenues earned from various channels touched $1.5 million in India and is expected to increase in the coming years according to company officials.

According to Steve Nicholson, chairman of SPG Media Group plc, the group publishes a magazine called Pharmaceutical Focus Asia out of India while another magazine called Asian Hospital would be published from June. The company is also planning to launch a search engine for business users during the current calendar year.

According to Nicholson, SPG Media was collaborating with a major software technology company for putting up its search engine. He said, "Our search engine would certainly be different from existing search engines like Google and Alta Vista." However, he declined to reveal the name of the software assisting SPG Media in setting up the search engine.

The group employs 450 people globally of which 115 are located in Hyderabad. By the end of this year Hyderabad will have 180 people.

Nicholson said that they would also be expanding operations and open offices in Nottingham and in Cape Town, besides having satellite offices in other Asian countries that would be controlled by the Indian subsidiary. SPG Media is also organising a four-day meet on EU Outsourcing from June 16 to 19, 2005 in Dubai.

Nicholson said, "An outsourcing Forum would be very useful to a number of companies in India who wished to penetrate into Europe where language is likely to be a problem." He said, "for most Europeans coming to India is very difficult and in such instances a Forum would benefit both the buyers and providers of BPO services in various fields such as application development, bill processing, data warehousing, HR services, IT development, IT services management, records management, and secretarial services," he said.

International Data Corporation (IDC), has predicted that the global ITES/BPO market would touch $680 billion by 2008 from last year's $405 billion.

IDC also said that the EU Outsourcing deals of 100 leading companies went up to $49 billion in 2003, a rise of 78 per cent over the previous year. It forecast that the EU Outsourcing market would grow more rapidly in the near future.

Vijay Chintamaneni, director, SPG Media (India), said India's unmatched value proposition for customers based on factors such as cost savings, productivity gains and quality improvements have given it an edge in the global ITES-BPO marketplace.

He said that given India's core strengths and standing in the global ITES-BPO scene, many EU companies would find it an attractive ITES-BPO hub and the Dubai Forum would facilitate formation of many strategic alliances between EU buyers and Indian sellers.