Macmillan is a large, UK-based publishing company founded in 1843 that came to India over 100 years ago, in 1892. Macmillan India started off as a purely domestic publishing business and soon became synonymous with quality educational books. Over the course of its century in India, Macmillan published some of India’s greatest authors, including Rabindranath Tagore; addressed the needs of local language educational publishing; and published popular modern writing, including Shiv Khera’s best-selling "You Can Win."
In 1976, Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister, inaugurated the company’s new publishing services division in Bangalore. This division, for a long time referred to as the “Information Processing Division,” offered high-quality editorial and production services to international book and journal publishers. With the growth of the Internet as a medium of content consumption, in 2004, the company began to address the high-end technology and digital-publishing needs of publishers through a wholly-owned subsidiary, MPS Technologies.
In a rapidly changing market environment that offered enormous opportunities for growth, there was a need to put in place a new strategy that would enable each aspect of the business to realize its maximum potential. The company underwent a demerger process to form MPS Ltd and Macmillan Publishers India Ltd. The former focuses on the publishing technology and services business and the latter on domestic publishing activities.