IndiaMART to Enter Big League With Khosla Hire

The Economic Times

Hyderabad: Online directory services and marketplace for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) IndiaMart has hired Mudit Khosla as senior vicepresident for big supplier initiatives. The former CEO of location-based mcommerce marketplace Tradus adds to the list of key hires by the B2B marketplace in the past six months.

With a new core team, the decade-old business is considering a shift in services offered to its 20-lakh strong SME base and tap into the sourcing needs of large companies.

“We will provide value-added and complementary services to our SME base in the form of SAAS (software as a solution) platform and innovative financing solution for buyer side on credit which will be rolled out by Diwali this year,” said Dinesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of IndiaMart in an interview to ET.

Former executive director of DBS Digital Bank Lizzie Chapman was appointed to the board of directors by the company earlier this year and she will spearhead the financing solution for SMEs in collaboration with banks. Chinese B2B giant Alibaba launched its online service MYBank for SMEs in China which find it difficult to raise credit from financial institutions.

On the supply side, the company is all out to woo big firms for their sourcing requirements. “Currently, around 80% of the Fortune 500 companies use IndiaMart regularly for their sourcing needs. We will develop specialised offerings and services for large corporate and brands through our big buyer initiative, which is currently in the pilot phase. We will work with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) providers to integrate our solutions so that their Request for Quotations (RFQ) is directed to IndiaMart. This could give us 80% of our revenues in the next 2-5 years,” said Agarwal.
Companies such as Reliance, Tata Motors and L&T currently use IndiaMart for their sourcing requirements. The company processed around 5 lakh RFQs last month.

Another key hire, Prateek Chandra, who joined as chief financial officer at IndiaMart Intermesh will be looking at acquisition in the mobile technology sector as well as companies in new geographies for inorganic expansion . “We are looking to expand to Europe as well as emerging markets such as Spain, Indonesia and Brazil. In the latter, we would like to create Tolexo-like platforms,” said Dinesh Agarwal.

Economic Times - Bangalore-29 June, 2015