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Indiainfo.com to spend $50 million in India

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

The Bangalore based Indiainfo.com portal has major plans. Much of this will be unveiled during the course of the year when it will spend in India nearly $50 million of the total $90 million set aside for brand building and promotion for across US, UK, ME and India. This is a portal with revenues of $10 million ($3 million from India), six to seven million page views a month and one which had spent less than $10 million on advertising and marketing. It is now looking at spending $90 million, hitting 20 to 30 million page views a month in the next couple of months and a revenue of $20 million in India by year ending March 2001. Needless to add, net profit is not in the reckoning for another two years, though it is already profitable at the gross level. Said Raj Koneru, Chairman, "We are in the process of creating mindshare and market share currently."

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The portal, which has been in the making for a over a year through acquisition of eight companies, comprise several sub portals such as careerindia.com, thatscrisket.com, evesindia.com etc. It is now offering online stock trading for resident and non-resident Indians and an auction site for the Indian community as additional service. According to Koneru of Indiainfo.com, which is also into providing e-commerce and infrastructure services besides online content through indiainfo.com portal, much of the trading will come from non resident Indians (NRIs) to begin with. It is expected to catch on among local Indians sooner than later.

Indiainfo.com has IL&FS as its sub broker currently but it has plans to become a broker through acquiring a brokerage house in India. The other big plan is to have shopping mall of its own which will also provide free space to shoppers, thus earning through transactions. The model followed by Indiainfo.com is not one based on aggregating eyeballs, which Koneru sees only as a means to an end. "In the last one year we have been quietly building the back end for transaction processing capabilities with payment gateways, security, etc being put in place. We did not want to do any talking before that." Having said that, the company is not against using page views to sell space.

Koneru claims to have "original content as opposed to both Rediff and Satyam Infoway" and will make a pitch, among other things, as a media company in the Indian market in the coming months. The Indiainfo.com site, which offers web services of the global market, is also one of the largest providers of hosting services and hosts both All India Radio and Doordarshan besides several others. It is also in the process of building an online advertising network, which will aggregate user profiles on all Indian sites and sell the profile to advertisers worldwide.

Koneru co-founded Intelligroup Inc which he took public on the Nasdaq in 1996. Among the first IT services company founded by an Indian to obtain a Nasdaq listing, Intelligroup's revenue for fiscal 1999 was approximately $200 million, aggregating a growth rate of 1,887 percent over a five year period. Recently, Intelligroup spun off its Internet solutions business into a separate company, Seranova Inc, which is now headed by Koneru as Chief Executive Officer.

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