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- Ten years of Internet in India; ten successful years of IndiaMART.com
- Crosses ten thousand clients mark
- Reaches over ten million visitors contributing 55 million pageviews a month
- Generates over 10,000 global B2B enquiries every day
- Initiated rupees 100 billion worth of business
- Directory of over 2,50,000 Indian SME businesses
- To add another 300 people
New Delhi, April 04, 2006: IndiaMART,one of the oldest Internet businesses in India that started with the advent of Internet in India in 1996, today completed ten successful years of sustained profitable growth. The online business-to-business matchmaker between Indian suppliers and global buyers has 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. The company plans to hire 300 more people to extend services to global suppliers.
“IndiaMART was conceived to deliver benefits of Internet to the small and medium enterprises in India. I feel elated to share that IndiaMART is estimated to have initiated over rupees 100 billion worth of new business from global markets for its member businesses,” said Mr Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO – IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd.
Future Growth Plan
Mr Agarwal also announced that the B2B marketplace will now move towards becoming a ‘world-to-world’ B2B marketplace, thereby 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 centers in the world, the company is on way to adding another 450-people capacity center 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 at par with some of the largest online B2B players across the globe,” added Mr Agarwal.
Key statistics
IndiaMART today commands a visitor base of ten 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 (2,00,000) in its directory.” After one year, the figure has reached 2,50,000.
The ten-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 ten years of its operations with an average growth of 65% p.a.
IndiaMART has managed to surprise the critiques of online businesses on occasions more than one. The portal was featured on the cover page of Business World in the 2001 survey of dotcom profitability for being on 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, BBC discovered that the brand IndiaMART was as popular as 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 ‘Web 2.0’ survey in the year 2006, IndiaMART 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 Nov 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 6 people and motivate them with my example!” exclaims 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 three million rupee mark in the first financial year of launching our online venture- Justpaper.com for selling handmade papers globally,” says Mr. Swarnjeet Syan (Director, JustPaper.com).
Our visitors sometime 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,” says Mr Dinesh Agarwal.
IndiaMART Growth Indicators (last five years):
