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April Edition 2007
DEVELOPING
INDIA ONLINE
10 years, 10,000 clients, 10,000 business leads a day  An
internet business that started with the advent of the Internet in India
in 1996, last year completed 10 successful years of sustained profitable
growth. The online business-to-business matchmaker between Indian
suppliers and global buyers also crossed the 10,000 client mark at the
same time, making it the undisputed market-leader in India and one of
the top five B2B marketplaces in the world in terms of directory
database, catalogs, content and traffic. "IndiaMART was conceived to deliver benefits of the Internet to the small and medium-sized enterprises in India. I feel elated to share that it is estimated to have initiated over 100bn rupees worth of new business from global markets for its member businesses," said Dinesh Agarwal, founder and CEO, IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd. “Our visitors sometimes think of us as a government agency promoting export from India. This gives us the confidence to go ahead and build more valuable services for them.” Dinesh also said that the B2B marketplace will now move towards becoming a "world-to- world" B2B marketplace, extending its online business promotion services to global suppliers. The company plans to hire 300 more professionals in the near term to empower the transition. Already the owner of one of the largest state-of-the-art web-development centres in the world, the company is on way to adding another 450-people capacity centre in Noida. "Online B2B matchmaking is about building trust amongst buyers and suppliers over a sustained period of time. Having achieved that, we are now looking at expanding the marketplace from 'India-to-world' model to a 'world-to-world' model. This expansion will put IndiaMART on a par with some of the largest online B2B players across the globe," added Dinesh. Key statistics India MART today commands a visitor base of 10 million unique business visitors globally, that translates into 55 million effective page-views on the marketplace every month. In 2005, The Economic Times in its article “Small units of all lands unite on IndiaMART” observed: “Of the five lakh small units operating in country, the website has names of two lakh (200,000) in its directory.” After one year, the figure has reached 250,000. The 10-year journey What started in 1996 as a sole proprietorship firm, today employs nearly 600 web professionals across 22 locations in India. Based on a purely online B2B business model, IndiaMART not only broke-even in the very first year of its launch but also registered profitable growth in all 10 years of its operations with an average growth of 65% per year. India MART has managed to surprise the critiques of online businesses on more than one occasion. The portal was featured on the cover page of Business World in the 2001 survey of dotcom profitability for being the only profit-making online business in India. CNBC channel later picked IndiaMART's business model to be analyzed by McKinsey, who commended the marketplace for its financial prudence and solid revenue streams. The story of this engineer entrepreneur with a dream to power the growth of Indian businesses became a case study in all major business media including Hindustan Times, The Economic Times, CIO, Business Today, Dataquest and Aaj Tak. During a report on small businesses in Moradabad, the BBC discovered that the brand IndiaMART was as popular as the Internet itself amongst the artisans and exporter-manufacturers. In 2004, IndiaMART became India's first ISO 9001 :2000 certified web-development company. In 2005, Dinesh Agarwal was picked up by CNBC for their “Young Turks” series that focuses on young achievers poised to become tomorrow's leaders. In Business World's "Web 2.0" survey last year, India MART secured its Place as one of the successful internet businesses even as the survey focused primarily on B2C businesses. Team IndiaMART IndiaMART management is not only known for its financial prudence and result-oriented approach but also for creating a promising career for beginners by nurturing and transforming them to become specialists and managers generating value for the organization. It employs close to 600 people at 22 locations, including MBAs, MCAs, engineers, web-designers and other internet specialists. A good number of its employees that joined IndiaMART as basic data entry operators or even front-desk executives some years ago, are today trained internet specialists managing their teams in web-design, sales or web-operations. “I joined here as a front office executive in November 2003 with little career aspirations to follow. IndiaMART encouraged me to look ahead and develop myself into a web-promotion specialist. Today I lead a team of six people and motivate them with my example.” commented web promotion specialist Nidhi Madan. What clients say IndiaMART has helped SME manufacturers in small towns to spread their businesses abroad and cut down their marketing costs and hefty commissions charged by brokers. IndiaMART has also enabled thousands of entrepreneurs to launch their business from scratch. “We touched the 3m rupee mark in the first financial year of launching our online venture: www.justpaper.com for selling handmade papers globally,” says Swarnjeet Syan, director, JustPaper.com. |
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