Business Plan for a microfinance magazine

Abstract

The microfinance industry worldwide has been growing faster than the Chinese economy at a CAGR of 13percent. Asia and in particular India has an even higher growth rate in the microfinance industry. According to INTELLECAP reports, the market size for microfinance in India is in the range of 58 to 77 million clients. This translates to an annual credit demand of USD5.7 to USD19.1 billion (INR 230 to INR773 billion). This high growth industry requires platforms to share ideas, strategies, best practices, general news and training materials. There are institutions like CGAP, MIX, SEEP, INTELLECAP, Microfinance gateway that do an admirable job of providing information on a vast array of topics. However, most of their content is oriented towards the practitioners and researchers in the fields. The sudden growth in the field has meant employing non-practitioners and a surge in interest about microfinance industry amongst general public. Also all the stakeholders in the microfinance industry are very interested in learning about initiatives at grass root levels in different countries and contexts in addition to learning more at the policy level. We have done a survey of the current Microfinance Focus magazine subscriber base that confirms our belief in positioning the product to this target segment. There is a need for a content provider in micro finance industry who can make the available information more accessible to new segments of general public and non-practitioners who are employed as general management with MFI s (microfinance institutions). Microfinance Focus is one such entity that plans to reach this target segment by publishing a print magazine. Microfinance Focus magazine will also provide information about grass root initiatives in India and abroad. The opportunity for this magazine is to become a content provider with the broadest audience base in microfinance industry. The people associated with Microfinance Focus magazine have all been active in microfinance industry for a long time and hence can understand the needs of industry. Together the directors and advisors of microfinance focus have hundreds of years of cumulative experience in the microfinance industry. The profile of people associated with Microfinance Focus is part of a later section in this report. The context is just about right as the micro finance industry is growing at a fast rate and consequently the target segment of microfinance magazine is also growing. This magazine is the only monthly publication available in the microfinance industry. We provide the details of value proposition for subscribers, MFI, banks and financial institutions in a section below. A separate section is devoted to cost analysis and pricing. Financial projections and development of a self sustaining revenue model is also illustrated.