The 70-year-old CMP, a Classic HBS Case Which Holds the Record of “Publishing 10 Titles and Selling 100,000 Copies Per Day”

The Massachusetts-based Harvard Business School (HBS), one of the world’s best-known business schools, offers courses that continuously study and analyze the world’s greatest business cases. Students from all over the world at HBS are in a heated debate over an established Chinese publishing house—China Machine Press (CMP), which holds the industry record of “publishing 10 titles and selling 100,000 copies per day.” CMP is also the first case of China’s cultural industry included in the HBS MBA Cases.

CMP has lately been celebrating its 70 anniversary. One of the largest science and technology publishers in China, CMP has published a diversity of sci-tech journals and books since its inception, including Mechanical Workers, the first journal about mechanical science and technology published after the P.R.C. was founded, the Journal of Mechanical Engineering, a top academic journal whose editorial board was chaired by Qian Xuesen, Qian Weichang, and Lu Yongxiang, among other top experts, the Mechanical Engineering Handbook and the Electrical Engineering Handbook, electromechanical encyclopedias compiled by thousands of experts in these fields…

As is known to all, into the digital age, the global publishing community is working hard to integrate new technologies with content and marketing. To speed up this effort, an established publisher, CMP is vigorously digitalizing its content, production, marketing, basic platforms and management. Thanks to such upgrades, CMP has built up robust production and marketing capacities: according to up-to-date statistics, CMP’s main publishing business has grown at a rate above 5% annually, and emerging business segments, such as media convergence, have grown at a rate above 10% annually. In 2021, CMP “published 10 titles and sold 100,000 copies per day.”

As a result, CMP’s communication, production and marketing approach is regarded as “an exploratory example for the shift from traditional publishing to omnimedia publishing and communication.”

In the view of Li Qi, Chairman of CMP, “a strong market awareness and a bold pioneering spirit” are in the bones of CMP staff. He believes that, for such a comprehensive sci-tech publishing house to stay alive and thrive in a fast-changing market, it has to stay up to date, stay relevant and stay innovation-driven.

SOURCE: China Machine Press (CMP)