The iGroup (Asia Pacific) Limited, is a Hong Kong registered multinational organisation with offices spanning 14 countries in the Asia Pacific region and with a total staff force of over 1000.
Company History
Book Promotion and Service, the first of the iGroup offices, was formed in 1983 and initially specialized in the marketing and distribution of printed books in Thailand and its neighboring countries.
As new developments in the library and information sectors underwent growth and change, so too the company grew to meet its customer’s needs with additional resources and services, including distribution of electronic information delivered in CD-ROM and Internet/Intranet media. The company also began developing its own technologies such as eLib, a library management system.
As the business volume in each territory grew, local companies were opened to support existing customers and to continue to grow our business base.
From the late 1980s to mid-1990s, offices were opened in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam.
The iGroup was formally incorporated in mid-1999, in recognition that the many individual companies of the group could benefit from a formal infrastructure to share resources.
The latest additions to the iGroup companies are iGroup Representative Offices in Beijing and Shanghai and in Indonesia and Japan; iGroup (Australasia) Pty. Ltd. in Melbourne; iGroup Korea, and a joint venture in India, iGroup Infotech India Pvt Ltd. Our newest offices, since 2013, are in Myanmar and Bucharest, Romania.
The iGroup focuses on the knowledge management and information industry, and caters to the needs of our customers: librarians, students, academics, educators, scientists and research professionals.
Personnel and Customer Base
The iGroup has over 1000 staff. Historically our core customers are academic institutions and libraries – although in recent years we have expanded into the healthcare, government, research and corporate markets. Our personnel are organized by expertise for each of these respective disciplines.
Throughout the region, we estimate that we service over two thousand institutional customers.
Core Competencies
The iGroup aims to be a one-stop shop for information products and library technologies. Our ability to provide a full spectrum of related products and services with localized support from each of our regional offices, establishes us as the key information industry partner in the Asia Pacific region
From the late 1990s, the iGroup companies have initiated and successfully implemented many pioneering consortia throughout the region. These successes are largely due to our close working relationship and credibility with both information providers and customers. We have set up consortia in China, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Australia involving products from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery, Chemical Abstracts Service, IEEE, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Springer, CSA, Proquest and many more.
As the lines between A&I (abstract and index), full text databases, eJournals and eBooks have converged, the iGroup finds itself in the best position to provide our customers with comprehensive support for their information needs.
We have the required competencies in data consumption, as well as the linking technologies between abstracts and full text, and between different secondary databases. We can provide the required hardware and software to drive these information solutions. Most importantly, we have shown through the years that we are also committed to continuously review and upgrade our competencies, keeping pace with the fast changing information scene.
