Indiainfo.com, the horizontal portal and one of the earliest entrants to the dotcom business may soon achieve a rare distinction. It will soon achieve a cash break even, possibly the only dotcom company in the country to do so. By restructuring its operations and reducing costs the company is on the threshold of cash breakeven during this month.

Indiainfo.com is likely to generate an income of Rs 37 lakh for January as against the registered income of Rs 35 lakh for the month of December 2001. As against this its cost in that month is expected to be around Rs 35 lakh, thus generating a surplus of Rs 2 lakh. The portal which currently has a manpower strength of 104, has reduced their costs from around Rs 2.25 crore in August 2000 to Rs 37 lakh per month now.

The break-up figures of the income generated by Indiainfo.com in various areas for the month of December, 2001, are: Advertising - Rs 16 lakh (45 per cent), CareerIndia Subscriptions Rs 2.7 lakh (8 per cent), CareerIndia Offline Placements Rs 5.6 lakh (16 per cent), Web Solutions Projects Rs 4.7 lakh (14 per cent) and others Rs 6 lakh (17 per cent). The others include offline quiz shows, e-commerce transactions on the site, travel bookings on the site, annual fee based alliances, content syndication services, translations of content into regional languages and customised branded content generation for clients.

The portal which has witnessed an investment of $15 million since its inception in April 1999 has restructured its operations by focussing on areas which generate revenues.

Talking to Deccan Herald, Indiainfo.com Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer B G Mahesh said "after the hype was gone, we had to address the reality." This included streamlining the opportunities to meet revenue targets. This also led Indiainfo.com to identify content areas "where they could make money".

This required a mix of cutting down costs and increasing revenues. According to Mr. Sriram Hebbar, Vice-President - Marketing, this has been achieved by rationalising the cost structure with market revenue opportunity. Centralising production to Bangalore also led to some replacements where people were unable to relocate, moving away from handling e-commerce logistics to becoming an e-commerce platform.

Mr Giri Balasubramaniam N, vice-president - strategy and alliances, said the content areas of the portal were streamlined and it involved taking some "non-emotional decisions" of removing some of the content channels. "Investing in people is expensive," he remarked.

Betting on alliances to deliver a profit-making revenue model, Mr. Balasubramaniam said Indinfo.com entered into alliances for both content channels and e-commerce platform. They have formed partnerships in content areas such as classifieds, I-T returns, matrimonial, real estate among others. For the e-commerce segment, Indiainfo.com has tied up with various e-commerce specific portals like Fabmart, ValueIndia, Baazar, Namaste.

Mr. Balasubramaniam said Indiainfo.com acts as a platform for e-commerce transactions and around 80-82 per cent of the transactions are from the US.

Currently, for Indiainfo.com, 50 per cent of its traffic comes from overseas which includes, the US, UK, Gulf region, Singapore, Australia among others.

Positioning themselves as the "window to convenient life, Mr. B G Mahesh said, the portal has created a brand identity of India as a gateway "to all that is India." As far as their future plans are concerned, Mr. Balasubramaniam said they would focus on building each of their channels as an independent self-sustaining model.

They would be also looking at combining both an offline and online models and have already published the IT quiz book based on their content on the portal. This will be further lined with publications on current affairs and cricket, he added.

By P P Thimmaya

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