Legal News and Views -  Asia Pacific and Beyond

Wolters Kluwer CEO says, said “explosive” growth in China’s legal profession will drive sales increases of more than 10 percent a year in the country.

McKinstry  told Chinese press in Beijing yesterday that China will have about 2 million lawyers by 2020, from  a figure 170,000 today, propelling demand for legal services. The number of regulations and compliance work will increase as China’s financial markets come more in line with practices in the U.S. and Europe, she said.

Here's the rest of the report from Bloomberg

“China is a very important market for us,” McKinstry, 51, said. “If you look at the projections in the growth of professionals, it’s just explosive.”

Wolters Kluwer, the largest bilingual legal publisher in China, is looking for growth in Asia after overall profit fell in the past two years and sales increased less than 2 percent in annually since 2005. The company began serving foreign law firms and multinational companies in China in 1985, when there was essentially no domestic legal profession, McKinstry said. China sales will increase more than 10 percent a year for the “foreseeable future,” she said.

The Asia Pacific region accounted for about 138 million euros ($174.7 million), or 4 percent, of the company’s global sales of 3.43 billion euros last year, according to company filings. China was about a quarter of the Asia total, said McKinstry, who’s been in the job since 2003.

Growth Through Partnerships

Growth in China will be primarily organic, and involve partnerships with Chinese companies, because of prohibitions on foreign acquisitions of Chinese publishing companies, McKinstry said. The company yesterday signed partnerships with China’s Commercial Press for global cooperation in legal publishing, and a second agreement with China Financial & Economic Publishing House to put its tax and accounting content on Wolters Kluwer’s IntelliConnect global research database.

The company will continue to use cash for dividends, debt repayment and investments in the business, McKinstry said. Wolters is open to small acquisitions in the area of software for tax accounting and health applications, she said. Japan, India, China and Australia are markets where the company would be interested in buying such software capability, she said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-31/wolters-kluwer-says-explosive-china-growth-fuels-sales-for-law-firms.html