China Publishing Group Corporation (CPG) is a large-scale trade and professional publishing group covering print and digital publishing, copyright transactions, and book import and export with publication as its core business. CPG was founded in 2002 and is one of China’s largest publishing groups. With 40 publishing companies, 96 subsidiaries, and three wholesalers, CPG holds a 7% share of the domestic book retail market.

CPG’s publishing imprints include the People’s Publishing House, the People’s Literature Publishing House, the Commercial Press (founded in the late 19th century), Zhonghua Book Company, Encyclopedia of China Publishing House, China Fine Arts Publishing Group, People’s Music Publishing House, SDX Joint Publishing Company, China Translation and Publishing Corporation, Orient Publishing Centre, Xinhua Bookstore Head Office, Zhonghua Book Company (in operation for more than 100 years), China National Publishing Industry Trading Corporation and China National Publications Import & Export Corporation (CNPIEC).

CPG aspires to be a major actor in the global publishing industry and already releases more than 10,000 new audio-visual, electronic and online publications per year, along with concluding 1,000 rights transactions per year. Its imports and exports division, CNIEPC, shifts a total of 200,000 titles per year, which represents a market share of 62% for imports and 30% for exports, and handles 20 million items per year in imports and exports through its respective division (CNPIEC), for which it has established a network of 28 offices in 130 countries. CNPIEC claims annual revenues of 2 billion RMB.

Analysis & Key Developments

Financial

In 2014, the revenue of CPG increased to 9.27 billion RMB, up from 9.09 billion RMB in 2013. Profits increased to 1.12 billion RMB from 1.02 billion RMB in the previous year. The group’s total assets amount to 15 billion RMB, an increase of 20.4%.

Branding

In 2014 CPG pledged to increase branding efforts and acquired Xinhua Printing House, which merged with Research Publishing House. CPG also entered into partnerships with Duke University Press and Cambridge University Press.

International

Additional to CPG’s 28 overseas publishing houses, chain bookstores and offices, the group plans to start a subsidiary of MCLSC in New Jersey. MCLSC is a corporation-oriented joint venture of several CPG imprints and selects more than 400 modern Chinese works in humanities, social sciences and culture.

In 2014, CPG sold foreign rights of 619 titles.

Digital

In 2014, digital operations generated 7.23% or 640 million RMB of the group’s overall revenues, representing a year-on-year growth of 40%. YeeCloud is a multilingual translation service platform supported by Internet and cloud technology with a market value of nearly 1 billion RMB. The CNP eReading platform, developed by CNPIEC, lists more than 1.7 million overseas e-books and more than 200,000 domestic e-books and journal resources.

CPG also has plans to launch a digital music publishing platform.

Bestsellers

CPG achieved sales exceeding 100,000 copies for 66 titles. Twelve of these were published in 2014, including Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, which sold 1.24 million copies of the first edition and 574,000 copies of the second edition. Other bestselling titles were The Cuckoo’s Calling (150,000 copies sold), Macau Is A City (150,000), and I Love You on the Cloud (127,000).

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