IN A jittery dotcom space, Indiainfo's SWIFT strategy is paying off, as the company is heading for a cash break-even by January 2002. Severe cost cutting coupled with an offline presence, newer avenues of revenues and comfortable reserves have put the horizontal portal, Indiainfo.com, on a strong footing.

Stringent accounting which shrunk revenue cycles to a monthly basis has seen Indiainfo reporting increases in revenues by as much as eight times in the last eight months. The company's revenues have increased from Rs 4 lakh in April 2001 to around Rs 32 lakh in October. Expenditure has been curtailed considerably from a high of Rs 2.2 crore in September 2000 to around Rs 40 lakh in October 2001.

"We expect to achieve a cash break-even by January 2002,"said B.G. Mahesh, co-founder and CEO, Indiainfo.

After realising that it was necessary to have multiple revenue streams and an offline presence, the company embarked on a restructuring exercise by implementing Project SWIFT early this year. "It has started to payoff, and the gap of Rs 8 to 10 lakh between the earnings and expenditure would be made up by the last quarter this year," Mr Sriram Hebbar, Vice-President, Marketing, said.

Project SWIFT stands for strategy, win-win, innovation, focus and teamwork. The company has evolved a multiple revenue stream model and produced its content and services. The restructured Indiainfo has an employee strength of 102 as against 375 in September 2000.

Indiainfo has created verticals such as Careerindia.com, Thatscricket, evesindia.com, quizbrain.com among others. It has also established an offline presence in quizbrain.com, e-commerce and careerindia.com. It offered placement services through Careerindia.com and expected to start a Japanese language training course for software professionals soon, said Mr Mahesh.

The company has reduced its exposure to e-commerce operations drastically and centralised its operations from Bangalore. "We no longer handle the logistical part of the e-commerce and the vendor will be shipping the products directly to the consumer," Mr Giri Balasubramaniam, Vice-President, Alliances, said.

The portal has e-com alliances with Fabmart, NRI Gift Shop, Value India, Gloves, Namaste and Bazaare.

Mr Mahesh admitted that the company went out of track mainly because of the guesstimation of demand for the Internet offerings and due to the wrong forecasting of revenues.

"We have reduced our dependence on advertising revenues to a large extent," said Mr Hebbar. The ad revenues accounted for some 56 per cent of the total revenues in October as against 90 per cent a year ago.

"We intend to reduce the dependence on ad revenues further and want it to stabilise at around 45 per cent of the overall revenues," said Mr Hebbar.

According to Mr Mahesh, the company does not intend to raise any funds in the near future. "We are comfortable with our reserves, which include a portion of the unspent funds raised earlier and some Rs 9 crore refunded by VSNL due to the failure of the tie-up," he said.

The portal has seen a huge surge in page views in the last several months. Pageviews in September stood at 95.1 million as against 61.5 million in November last year and 3.5 million in December 1999. Its vernacular sites have been a hit among the NRIs. The vernacular sites have registered some 9.8 million page views per month.

Indiainfo expects its Web solutions division to do well. The business from the Web solutions division accounted for 12 per cent of revenues in October 2001. Customers include HP, Parke Davis, Tanishq and EID Parry among others.