Rediff eyes India mobile boom

MUMBAI: India-based Internet portal Rediff.com hopes to ride the mobile phone boom in India to grow its revenues, but is also enhancing its products to attract an audience beyond Indians at home and abroad, its chairman said on Tuesday.

"It is very important to take a big position in mobile," Ajit Balakrishnan, chairman of Rediff, told Reuters in an interview by telephone from New York. The company has been listed on Nasdaq five years on Tuesday.

"There is little doubt that in the next two, three years, the majority of (Internet) access will be through mobile (devices)," he said.

India's mobile phone base of 54 million is already twice its Internet user base.

"Many (mobile) operators are still rigging up the billing systems, so that stage of development is still on," he said.

"More than half of the 50 million mobile users have just got the phone into their hands, so they are busy making phone calls and haven't got down to doing more. But one of these days they will," he said.

Set up in 1996, Mumbai-headquartered Rediff provides news, communication, entertainment and shopping services for Indians.

It had 36 million registered users at the end of March, who have access to its 1 gigabyte free email service.

To boost Rediff's appeal, Balakrishnan said it was working on innovations to products such as its search and instant messaging.

"We are working on products which are no longer limited by the Indian geography or Indian diaspora."

He cited products such as Rediff Bol, an instant messenger that works on low-end computers on low bandwidth and a search engine that uses concepts not keywords.

Rediff will spend the next five years drawing in users through innovation, helped by tens of thousands of Indian software engineers who help test the products at early stages, he said.

"We are leveraging it off the Indian software community ... Youngsters in their 20s and 30s are excited to work for us for free."

Rediff has yet to make a profit, and ended last year with a net loss of $1.4 million on revenue of $12.6 million.