Yahoo India to grow by 40%

MUMBAI: Who says dotcom age is over. Yahoo India is well poised to grow with an annual growth of 40 percent. The company has redefined its Indian strategy and is concentrating on three focus areas currently.

To start with, the company would focus on co-branding exercises that basically means online media sales, which currently contributes 50 percent of total Yahoo India revenues. For this, the company has mapped business strategies to two key areas that include focus on evolved online advertisers and online media advertising through customized market solutions wherein the target advertising would depend on the profile of online viewer.

The total online advertising market in 2003 in India was about $10 million and Yahoo had about 20 percent share. The projected market size for online advertising market in 2004 is Rs 100 crore and Yahoo is expects to garner around 25 percent share of that.

Yahoo has 30 million registered users currently. For Yahoo Mail, India is number two in logins behind US. The regional user growth rate for India is about 3.5 percent - four percent per month and this makes it number three behind China and South Korea.

The second focus area for Yahoo! would be mobile content and delivery and extended communication platform from online to mobile that contributes another 45 percent -50 percent of the revenue. The core Yahoo services include mail, messaging, PC2Mobile and information services like astro, cricket, dating being added. For mobile platform, within Yahoo fold, India is one of top three revenue earners, others being China and Brazil.

Thirdly, Yahoo is now going to start its own search technology - ‘Yahoo! Search Technology’. Till now, Yahoo was using the Google technology ‘Algorithmic search tool’.

According to Yahoo India country manager, Neville Taraporewala, "Each day Yahoo delivers 18 times more mail than Fedex. With 263 million users being added each day, Yahoo! will be the world’s fourth largest nation."

Yahoo India generated revenue of Rs 18 crore — Rs 20 crore in the fiscal ended December 2003 and is now expecting to grow by 40 percent this year. It has two companies in India that include Yahoo Software in Bangalore, a software development center, which is more of a cost center with 150 people and Yahoo India web services with 25 people.

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