Delhi-based Atlantic Books is an academic book publisher and a major importer of Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and Elsevier titles. Atlantic has two warehouses in Tronica city, Ghaziabad around 30 kilometres from the old publishing hub of Daryaganj. Atlantic’s 2,000 square- meter and 1,500 square-metre warehouses can store 5 million books, says its managing director Manish Gupta, but currently holds stock of just one million books. It uses SAP B1 ERP software to quickly catalog, store and locate books and Gupta is open to letting out his warehouse space to other book sellers on an Opex model.
While only Seagull of Kolkata currently rents some of his capacity, Gupta says that his warehouse has partially automated its operations to ensure that the software and operation costs are manageable. Warehousing operations in India can be either cheap or expensive depending on the location, the software used and the amount of automation deployed.
McGraw Hill has a location- defined warehouse of 48,000 square- feet in Sector 63 Noida near Delhi, the new hub for big brand publishers. The warehousing software in Noida is based on randomized storage used universally by McGraw Hill but the operations are not as sophisticated as its Singapore hub that has last mile conveyor connectivity like internet giant Amazon.
The warehouse appeared to be sparsely occupied and with around 20% utilization on our visit in December 2013. Jacob Koshy, assistant general manager; and Sabar Singh Bist, warehouse manager confirmed that during April to July when the inventory level increases to around `25 crore, the capacity utilization increases to about 50%.
The recently released sample survey of publishers conducted by FICCI and NBT says that only 17% of its publisher respondents have revenues of more than `100 crore while the majority are small publishers of one-tenth this size. Since most large publishers have large unused warehousing capacity, the Opex model of renting warehouse space and services could help smaller publishers and reduce the costs for large publishers.
Amazon and Flipkart, while offering the market place retailing model, offer free warehousing space with full software backup for all publishers who sell books through them. For books not sold through online stores, publishers big and small need to look at efficient low-cost rental agreements that create a win-win situation for all.
