On the Job: Strategy Case of Naukri.

com*
Info Edge (India) Limited was the first Internet Company to be listed on the Bombay Stock
Exchange and the National Stock Exchange on November 21, 2006. The Company was
incorporated on May 1, 1995 under the Companies Act, 1956 as Info Edge (India) Private
Limited and converted into a Public Limited on April 27, 2006. This was the officio-legal
face of the popular job site Naukri.com. Naukri is an Indian term meaning service, job or
employment. The journey started nearly two decades ago.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL BUG BITES

Sanjeev Bikhchandani used to work in HMM (now Glaxo SmithKline) in the early 1990s.
The offices did not have partitions then and there was open space and everyone could see,
hear, and talk to the others. He noticed that whenever the office copy of Business India
arrived most people would start reading from back to front where there were several pages of
recruitment advertisements. He realized that it was not as if everyone was looking for a job.
There was just the human tendency to look at jobs and assess where one stood in relation to
the job market. Then there were the head-hunters who were constantly looking for
prospective candidates on behalf of a few client companies and enticing them with job offers.
These jobs were not advertised in formal channels. Even if they were, headhunting was the
alternative channel that operated simultaneously. An entrepreneur at heart, Sanjeev thought
that if the job offers could be aggregated and matched with job resumes available it could
create a big business opportunity. That was in 1990.

Right from school when he would have been 12 or 13 years of age, Sanjeev dreamt of doing
MBA, working for a few years, and then striking on his own—atypical young person‘s
dream. He comes from a middle-class family. His father was in government service. Like
most middle-class fathers in India, he gave his children good education. Sanjeev studied in
St. Columbus School at Delhi and then sat for the IIT entrance. He cleared it but realized that
that doing economics from St. Stephens College would be a better option for him: his rank
wasn‘t good, it would take five years to graduate, and medically he was colour-blind. After
doing economics from Delhi University in 1984, he got selected as executive trainee with
Lintas and worked in advertising for three years. He then sat for the CAT and secured
admission into IIM Ahmedabad. Subsequently he was selected in 1989 as a management
trainee with GlaxoSmithKline (then HMM) where he worked for a year- and-a-half and then
quit. The next few years were trying and tough as usually happens with entrepreneurs.
Sanjeev set up an office in his father‘s home in the servants‘ quarter above the garage and
paid Rs. 800 monthly rent.

He started a company and called it Info Edge. Another company was set up with a partner.
They worked on salary surveys and database for trademarks. Both were rudimentary jobs if
we look at them in today‘s context. For instance, Sanjeev and his partner would look for
trademark applications data from the public library of the trademark registry and put all the
data in a format and sell the info package to pharmaceuticals companies looking forward to
acceptance or rejection of their trademark applications. Likewise, for entry-level salary
surveys they set up interviews for engineering graduates fresh out of college, collected data,
put them into databases and then contacted companies. The customized reports were then
sold to them at a price of Rs. 5000 each. After some time, Sanjeev and his partner parted
company with Sanjeev retaining Info Edge and the trademarks company taken by his partner.
Nearly five years of struggle followed.

WHAT IS WWW!
Sometime in October 1996, there was an IT Asia exhibition at Delhi. Sanjeev used to go to
see this exhibition and was particularly interested in visiting the small stalls where interesting
things were showcased. On one stall, that had www written on it, Sanjeev asked the owner of
the stall what that meant. The guy explained it was the World Wide Web. That got him
interested. Soon he was learning about Internet and websites and servers and e-mails. He got
interested in setting up a website but was told that was not possible as the servers that hosted
the websites were all in the U.S. He contacted his brother who by this time was a professor at
UCLA. His brother agreed to loan money for paying for hiring a server.

The struggle continued for a few more years. Sanjeev got married; his wife worked for
Nestle. That was a great support. He had a two-wheeler as he couldn‘t afford to buy a car.
Those days even IIMA graduates couldn‘t afford to buy cars unlike today. In between, there
were tough times when he had to work part-time at two jobs to make the two ends meet. He
taught management courses part-time to earn his keep. But the entrepreneur in him enjoyed
the challenges as they helped him to work on his own and set his own priorities. He gathered
partners and paid them in company shares as he didn‘t have cash to pay, asking them to do
parts of the job like programming, data entry, and support.

The group of friends purchased a lot of newspapers, opened the job advertisements sections,
and asked the data entry guys to enter the data into a format. This floppy was taken to a techie
friend and in a week he helped to create a simple website that was called Naukri.com. At that
time many of the new Indian websites like rediff, Khoj, and Samachar were focusing on the
non-resident Indians in the US. Naukri.com focused on Indians in India. That got the
company a lot of attention as Internet was a new thing and the media was writing a lot of
stories on it.
Naukri.com got launched in April 1997. In the first year, it got a business of Rs. 2.35 lakh. At
that time there were an estimated 14000 Internet users in India (In end-2014 there were an
estimated 290 million us- ers growing at 14 per cent). These people could have free access to
the website. The companies paid for the recruitment services. In the second year, the revenue
jumped to Rs. 18 lakh. At this time, Sanjeev realised he was on to something big.Next year,
the revenue jumped to Rs. 36 lakh with a first-time profit of Rs. 1.8 lakh but Sanjeev was yet
to draw a salary. By April 2000 they needed more money, got it from venture capital- ists,
and started investing it in building the infrastructure for the company. By November the same
year, the dotcom bust started. The next year came 9/11. Naukri.com—the flagship of Info
Edge—was one of the few dotcoms to survive the Internet meltdown of the early 2000s and
the post 9/11 impact.
MATRIMONY AND PROPERTY
About a year after Naukri.com was launched, Sanjeev went to meet Anil Lall, a software
programmer who was head of technology at Info Edge. He asked Lall whether they could
create a matrimonial site. Sanjeev expressed his wish to have one more classified category
besides jobs. Lall was given a few details and within
a week he had the site Jeevansathi.com up and running. Jeevan means life and saathi means
partner in the Indian languages. Initially everything was offered free. In April 2001, ICICI
Ventures was approached for venture funding and they asked Sanjeev to close down
Jeevansathi.com and focus on Naukri.com and move to one of the big five auditors. Sanjeev
went to his then auditors to thank them and tell them that they were withdrawing. To his
surprise, the auditors—Amit and Rohit Tandon—said they themselves were thinking of
closing down their business and were planning to enter online business. A deal took place and
Jeevansathi. com was partly sold to the Tandon brothers who sold it back to Sanjeev after a
few years.
Happenstance and serendipity play no mean role in entrepreneurship and business. Sharad
Malik was one of Naukri.com‘s shareholder and a computer science professor at Princeton.
On one of his visits to India, meeting Sanjeev, he just remarked how difficult it was to sell off
his ancestral property in Delhi. He asked Sanjeev if he could start a real estate website. And
Sanjeev did just that. 99acres.com was launched.
This is, in short, the story of how Info Edge started its journey.

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO INFO EDGE

Info Edge (India) Limited (Info Edge) is one of India‘s leading on-line classifieds company in
recruitment, matrimony, real estate, education and related services. It also invests in start-ups
in India and abroad. As of March 31, 2014, Info Edge had a network of 58 branch offices
located in 42 cities throughout India. The employee strength was above 3000 working in its
offices in India and in West Asia.
The vision of Info Edge is ―to create world-class platforms that transform lives‖. The mission
statement is: ―We will continuously delight our customers in current and new businesses by
delivering superior value through enhanced offerings on the internet and other platforms. We
will do this by preserving our entrepreneurial spirit and leveraging our financial strength and
expertise in building brands, communities, product and technology; sales and service‖. The
company values are five: customer delight, entrepreneurship, knowledge, results and trust.
Info Edge operates in three lines of businesses. Its core business of recruitment which is the
first and main business yielding the cash flows for investment into other businesses. The
second is the internal portfolio of businesses dealing with online platforms for real estate,
matrimony, and education that are growing. The third business is of investing in future
through start-ups where the company invests into potential businesses that are in early stages
and need funding. Here the activity is hectic as seen in the large number of 297 deals worth
US$ 1.6 billion done in 2013.
The annual report 2013–2014 provides an account of its financial performance. During the
financial year 2013–2014 Info Edge had total income of about Rs. 550 crore and profit after
tax of Rs. 129 crore.
STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AT INFO EDGE
Info Edge, as of October 2014, had eight directors on its board, of which five were
independent directors giving boost to its corporate governance. The positions of chairman
and managing director are separated. Kapil Kapoor is the non-executive chairman; Hitesh
Oberoi is the managing director and chief executive officer. Sanjeev Bikhchandani is the
executive vice-chairman. Ambarish Raghuvanshiwas till May 2014 the director, group
president (finance) and chief financial officer. Chintan Arvind Thakkar is the designated
chief financial officer who has joined in his place.
The management team is headed by Sanjeev Bikhchandani and consists of the heads of
business units and functional heads. The team is young, well-educated and professionally
qualified. Most of them have been with the company for more than 10 years. Sales function
gets a priority among functions to make it possible to market and support the various brands
of the company.

THE BUSINESSES OF INFO EDGE

Info Edge is in the online classified business helping people and businesses to connect. In this
sense, the purpose of the company is to create a virtual meeting place where people seeking
products and services and businesses intending to serve them can meet and transact business.
The business model of the company is the typical Internet company model where revenue is
earned by charging a fee for providing / exchanging information and / or for advertising
products and services. This simple business model can be extended to cover a wide range of
activities as the company has been doing over the years.
Some details about its businesses are as below:
Recruitment is the largest of the businesses that has recruitment classifieds on
www.naukri.com and www.naukrigulf.com and an offline executive search site
www.quadranglesearch.com. There are related sites one of which is professional networking
site www.brijj.com and a freshers‘ hiring site at www. firstnaukri.com.
Matrimony business has the online matrimony classified site www.jeevansathi.com and
offline Jeevan- sathi match points.
The real estate business has the online real estate classified at www.99acres.com and a real
estate broker- age business www.allcheckdeals.com.
Education business is served through the online education classified on www.shiksha.com.

STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESSES

Info Edge visualizes that each of its businesses has potential to grow through organic and
inorganic routes. The organic growth is perceived in the form of innovation and
customization of services offered and capi- talising on creating advertising revenue streams
through the company‘s portals. The company is also on the lookout to exploit opportunities
for widening the scope and geographical expansion of existing businesses. Related
diversification opportunities exist in extending the online classifieds to other market
segments of automobiles, educational services, and industrial products of which the company
has already moved into educational services.
The opportunities and threats for Info Edge are closely linked to anything to do with the
Internet. For instance, the demographic shift in India‘s population towards younger age
groups is an opportunity as youth are likely to be avid users of the Internet. Growth in the
employment markets whether positive or negative depends on the macro economic
conditions. At times when the employment markets do well, as happened in the case of IT
and ITES, the company stands to benefit. When the prospects of the employment market dim,
the company is likely to suffer. The continual improvements in the Internet infrastructure
including broadband access, Internet service penetration, falling prices of Internet access,
wider availability of Inter- net facilities, and increasing awareness among the general
population of the ease and convenience of using Internet help a lot.
According to a joint study by industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India
(IAMAI) and IMRB International, the Internet user base in the country stood at 278 million
claimed Internet users and 213 mil- lion active Internet users. By December 2014 active
Internet users were expected to reach 232 million by December 2014 and 269 million by June
2015. Estimated mobile Internet users in India in December 2014 were 173 million indicating
the huge scope of mobile telephony in spreading Internet usage. Mobile-based internet usage
is a welcome development for Info Edge. Mobile users are young, mostly urban but increas-
ingly rural, there is increasing use of applications on mobile phones and the trend is likely to
accelerate. Another development is the increasing use of hand-held devices such as tablets.
All these developments present a huge opportunity to companies such as Info Edge.

Looking to the businesses of Info Edge one can perceive a common thread in terms of the
life-cycle needs of people and the potential for using Internet to access information to satisfy
those needs. Thus, educational needs are followed by the need to look for a job. A job in hand
usually leads to the prospect of marriage. A marriage results in need for housing and so on.
When children arrive, they too need education and the life cy- cle starts all over again. But
did Sanjeev Bikhchandani think of his business like that? Quite likely, it seems.

THE PHENOMENON OF NAUKRI.COM

The country has numerous educational institutions and produces a large number of graduates
every year. These graduates seek information about the available jobs through different
means primarily through the print media, recruitment consultants, and online sources
including applying directly to the companies.
Among the usage of Internet, recruitment is the second-most popular use preceded only by E-
mail services. Online recruitment has emerged as a popular means of seeking candidates for
the corporate employers and recruitment consultants and for job seekers. This is especially
true for the most prospective segment of IT and ITES in the employment market in India.
Naukri.com is the most visible brand of Info Edge. The online classifieds and related division
that operates the Naukri.com portal is the highest revenue earner. With revenues of Rs 372
crore, Naukri.com is the market leader in the online classified jobs market. Its success has
seen the classified business shift dramatically from print to online. It also constitutes a
majority of about 74 per cent of Info Edge‘s revenues. As of October 2014, Naukri.com
claimed it had a database of about 39 million registered job seekers and an average of about
13,000 resumes being added daily while about 135,000 resumes were modified daily. These
are impressive numbers though there is a possibility that the millions among registered job
seekers might not be active users and there could be duplication in registration. Naukri.com is
an early mover in the online recruitment services business giving it an edge over its
competitors.

Naukri.com is not just a recruitment site. In fact, 90 per cent of the revenues of Naukri.com
are derived from B2B from recruiters. This is done through providing access to resume
database, job listing and response management, and employer branding and visibility. It is an
advertising site as well as it offers panels and banners for advertising that are a rich source of
revenue for Info Edge. There is a mobile section for mobile hiring and usage of this access
method is growing being 35 per cent in October 2014. Value-added services such as resume
writing, resume display, resume flash, and job mails create a repertoire of services for job
seekers. Recruiters have a special entry point through their username and password where
they can access the databases of resumes, post jobs, manage resumes, and communicate with
potential employees about their organization.

The combination of being an early mover, designing a portal that is continually improved to
offer better services to users, backed up by aggressive marketing has made Naukri.com the
market leader. There is a virtuous cycle of having higher traffic owing to the presence of a
large number of available jobs. Higher traffic creates the possibilities of higher response
which in turns attracts more client companies and recruiters. The business strategy for
Naukri.com is based on providing new products for recruiters, access through mobile,
differentiation through superior search facilities, and back up through customer service.
Addition of new features is aimed at keeping the business ahead of its competitors. Some of
the features added are career site and response management, personal profiles of recruiters,
referral hiring through access to social networks, and semantic searches.

The attractiveness of the online recruitment services has drawn competitors into the field. The
on- line recruitment services in India are also offered by portals such as Monster.com,
TimesJobs.com and Shine.com and Indeed besides the professional social network LinkedIn.
There are smaller players such as Timesjob.com, Indeed, and Jobsahead.com among several
others. The print media continues to remain popu-
lar where national dailies such as The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and The Hindu and
the government jobs media Employment News / Rozgar Samachar rule the roost.
Recruitment consultants and executive search firms are scattered throughout the metros and
even smaller cities and towns in India in large numbers. Competition is intense especially at
the lower end of the market. The ups and downs in the recruitment market heighten
uncertainties. There is excessive dependence on the IT and ITES job markets. The possibil-
ity of the new entrants offering online recruitment services remains high.

THE PROMISE OF JEEVANSATHI.COM

Matrimonial sites constitute the next big segment of online services after job sites in India.
Many of the environmental factors that make job sites popular apply to the case of matrimony
sites too. For instance, a younger population is a positive feature of the environment in both
the cases. Online matrimonial sites offer the advantages of easy accessibility, interactivity,
and low-cost services. After initial hesitation owing to privacy concerns and the risk of being
cheated, Indians have started using the online matrimonial services in larger numbers.
Traditionally, Indians have married through arranged marriages. The quintessential
matchmakers in different communities have played the role of bringing together families
interested in finding brides and grooms. The print media such as The Times of India and a
number of vernacular newspapers are a big source of matrimonial classifieds. Breakdown of
traditional networks, emergence of nuclear families, increased mobility, disconnection from
mother communities and younger people looking for wider choice however, have created a
large market for online matrimony services.

Info Edge embarked on the online matrimonial services through the Jeevansathi.com portal in
September 2004. By that time, the matrimony services market was already crowded.
Shaadi.com had a dominating presence in this segment of online services since 1997 being
the first-mover but was pushed back by Bharat- matrimony. There are other formidable
competitors such as Simplymarry.com, 123matrimonials.com and Rishtaa.com.
Jeevansathi.com is No. 3 matrimonial site in the country much behind its rivals with 13 per
cent share of the Rs 300 crore online markets. Market segmentation in the matrimonial
services business is based on geography (North / South) or communities based on religion,
castes and sub-castes. Bharatmatrimony leads in South and the non-resident communities
from southern states. Shaadi.com dominates in Punjab and Gujarat and the non-resident
Indians from these states. Jeevansaathi.com as yet does not seem to have a clear focus on an
identified market segment.
Jeevansathi.com adopts the prevalent business model of matrimony websites of free listing,
search, and expression of interest and paid services for establishing contact with a party of
interest. It has a few offline centers where clients can walk in for matching services. It also
operates franchise centers. It is one of those unique businesses where once a client is served
successfully she or he no longer remains a customer. The key to profitability lies in
converting a free client to a paid client. Info Edge is adopting an analytics-based approach to
improve the strike rate of converting clients to paid ones. This is a difficult proposition and
the company is yet to be successful in making the matrimony site business successful.

THE POTENTIAL OF 99ACRES.COM

The emergence of classifieds online services has touched various market segments; among
them is the booming market for real estates. Traditionally, buyers and sellers of property have
relied on the familiar broker or word-of-mouth information networks for seeking information.
Newspaper classified columns also have been popular media for disseminating or accessing
information regarding property. In recent years, real estate makes for the largest advertising
spend in print media.

Real estate is a growth industry. There are several reasons for the boom in the real estate
markets: rising incomes, changes in social structures, family mobility, urbanization, and
availability of home financing are some of the major ones. As compared to the job and
matrimony markets, the real estate market has some specific challenges. The real estate
market is fragmented; property exchange requires cumbersome paper- work; and it is difficult
to establish clear-cut norms leading to opaque dealings and involvement of black money. At
some places in India, the property dealing is also marred by the involvement of land mafia
and other criminal cabals.
99acres.com was launched in 2005 to serve various participants in the trading and exchange
of real estate. Among these are the buyers and sellers of property, developers, builders, and
brokers. The portal is comprehensive and provides services for advertising the availability of
properties, searching and browsing for properties, and gaining access to other Indian and
international sites related to property matters. Listing is paid for by agents and developers and
is free for individuals.
As of October 2014, 99acres.com claimed having a database of more than 540,000 real estate
listings and with 22000 paying agents and developers. Info Edge aims at its property listing
business improving traffic share and keep its growth rate high. For this, 99acres.com tries to
improve its number and quality of listings, improving sales team outreach and customer
service, enhancing product development, user experience and branding, and using mobile and
analytics to improve traffic share. Product development is in the form of offering price trends
to customers based on listings, showcasing new projects, and offering verification of listings
to improve quality of offering.
For Info Edge, 99acres.com is still a business in making. Despite earning revenue of Rs 76
crore, the loss at EBITDA level was Rs. 4.8 crore. This came about due to continued
investments in strengthening products and expanding sales networks. Real estate is perceived
as a big business from the viewpoint of advertising so 99acres.com is seen as a prospective
business.
Competition to 99acres.com arises from other popular property sites such as
Indiaproperty.com, magic- bricks.com, and makaan.com besides, commonfloor.com, and
housing.co.in with the first two posing stiff competition to 99acres.com and the print media
including the daily newspapers at the national, regional, and local levels. 99acres.com is the
leader in traffic share and one of India‘s first platforms to cater to the real estate market
online with 35 to 40 per cent share of the Rs 150 crore online businesses and around Rs 80
crore revenues from this segment and has a pan India listing of properties for sale, purchase
and rent spanning 25 plus cities. It brings together builders, brokers, dealers and interested
buyers /sellers and connects them over the online medium.

THE POTENTIAL OF SHIKSHA.COM

Shiksha in Hindi language means education. Info Edge launched Shiksha.com in May 2008.
The aim was to connect the provider of education to the seeker of education.
Compared to other emerging economies such as China and Brazil, India has a low enrolment
rate at the university level. By 2020, the Indian government aims to achieve 30 per cent gross
enrolment from the present 18 per cent, which will mean providing 40 million university
seats. Traditionally, the government has played the lead role as education provider through
public institutions but private sector is increasingly playing a more active role.
India has one of the largest education systems in the world. Demographic trends point out
that the population in India may exceed that of China and the middle class may be the largest
anywhere in the world. It is the Indian middle class which has education of its children as a
very high priority. Their aspiration is to see their children gain higher education in the best of
colleges and universities within India and abroad. This offers a unique opportunity to
education providers. Info Edge visualized this opportunity to cash on the rising aspirations of
the middle class and the post-secondary student.

Education providers provide high revenue in advertising spend to print media. They are also
interested in online advertising which is accessible to much of the younger population.
Shiksha.com operates on the business model of attracting advertising from education
providers both in India and abroad and providing information to prospective candidates.
Shiksha.com provides information on colleges, courses, scholarships and admission
information for various courses and colleges. On the other hand, Shiksha.com provides help
to institutions to attract high quality and talented students. The focus is on post-graduate
programmes and vocational courses in management, engineering, information technology,
medicine, law and hospitality besides coaching for entry into institutions. The website is
designed as a meeting place for students and alumni and experts in education to interact.

INVESTING IN START UPS

Since Hitesh Oberoi took over as the CEO and managing director of Info Edge in 2010,
Sanjeev Bikhchan- dani has been concentrating on external investments. What he does is
basically to replicate Naukri.com‘s success in other digital businesses. Sanjeev thought of
investing in other companies around 2008 as the core business of recruitment services was
generating plenty of cash.
Sanjeev has an eye for opportunity and then moves fast to convert that opportunity into
business. He invests only through Info Edge to avoid conflict of interest. As an investor he
offers only advice placing faith in the ability of entrepreneurs to run their businesses the way
they think it best to run them. The company invested into nine businesses vetting them out of
a population of 300 odd proposals that came. Six businesses in which Info Edge has stakes as
of October 2014 are: Zomato, Meritnation, PolicyBazaar, MyDala, Canvera, and Happily
Umarried. In Zomato and Meritnation, Info Edge has a controlling stake. Three businesses
failed to work and Info Edge had to write off Rs. 35 crore of its investments into StudyPlace,
99labels, and Floost. Sanjeev sees the acquired businesses as future opportunities that would
complement Naukri.com‘s suc- cess. He shared in an interview to a business magazine that
by 2018 he wants to see four or five of his businesses—either owned fully or substantially—
to have a billion-dollar market capital each if they were to list on the stock exchange.

FUNCTIONAL ACTIVITIES AT INFO EDGE

The major sources of funds for Info Edge are the subscription fee charged from clients for
recruitment, matrimonial, real estate services and education services. The company continues
to maintain healthy cash reserves that fund its investments into entrepreneurial ventures. The
expenditure takes place on different activities such as advertising, marketing and promotion
charges, employee salaries and sales incentives, administrative costs and costs of maintaining
the network and system infrastructure, such as internet connection and server hosting charges.
The company is a consistent dividend payer to its investors.
The technology used by Info Edge is Internet and information technology that remains in the
process of continual development. Research and development was not a priority area and was
mainly concerned with upkeep of hardware, optimizing usage of existing software
applications and search engines. But service design is critical to offering better service on the
portals. Innovations are mainly in terms of adding to the existing service packages. For
instance, online job fair was an idea implemented on Naukri.com while pro- vision of mobile
content has been tried out on all the four portals. There is presence of risk in breakdown of
services owing to interruptions in networks and systems. Since online services are operated
externally there is risk of hacking taking place. Disaster recovery systems also need to remain
in working condition to forestall risks of breakdown.
Brand management is critical to the Internet-based services. Naukri.com is rated as the top
job site in India on the basis of relevant statistics by research agencies such as Comscore,
Alexa, Juxt Consultant, and Quantcast.

It has launched several successful advertising campaigns for instance ―name calling‘ run by
good ad agencies such as FCB Ulka. Naukri.com is a highly visible brand and the brands of
Jeevansathi.com and 99acres.com have made good progress but not yet reached the visibility
of Naukri.com. New products are introduced regularly to stay ahead of competition. Some of
these involve complex analytics and research on consumer behavior, and the positive aspects
of competing products. Building brand and creating customer recall is a continual activity.
Heavy marketing and advertising expenditure is required to support the development of brand
equity. Nearly Rs. 86 crore was spent in the financial year 2013-2014 for advertising and
promotion of newer brands and sustenance of the older ones.
The human resource function at Info Edge is critical as the company is operating in the
service business. The number of employees has been steadily increasing from 870 in 2006 to
more than 3000 in October 2014. A formal induction programme has been put in place for
new recruits. Training is focused on continual upgrades of functional and domain knowledge
across disciplines. Continual addition has taken place at the senior and middle levels in
functions such as business development, finance, marketing, product, and tech- nology. There
is a human resource information system that helps to maintain employee records and
facilitates report generation for analysis. An in-house newsletter ‗Inside Edge‘ helps to
disseminate current events and major developments to employees. There is an employee
stock option plan in operation to motivate and involve employees in sharing wealth
generation.

ONLINE CLASSIFIEDS SERVICES

Consequent to the development of the World Wide Web, and the opening up of the Internet
to commercial users, classified advertising also began to appear on the web in ever-expanding
amounts. Online classifieds are probably as old as Internet news groups.
Globally, in the mid-1990s, web-based services that systematically targeted the three major
classified advertising categories of employment, automobiles and real estate were established
by computer software giants such as Microsoft and Internet upstarts alike. Employment
websites such as Seek, MyCareer and CareerOne were attractive both to job seekers and HR
departments of companies as these provided some unique benefits such as resume databases
and searching services.
The new media of online classifieds scored over the print media classifieds in terms of
relatively better and more convenient, fast and cheap way for prospective employers and
employees, particularly in the young socially and geographically mobile professional market
segment, to check each other out. At LG Electronics, a majority of recruitments were done
through online job sites such as Naukri.com. DLF short listing of management trainees and
candidates for higher positions had all moved to job portals such as Naukri.com. HR
managers claim to have brought huge reductions in recruitment costs by using online
classifieds services. What we observe in the phenomenon of online classifieds services is the
trend of disintermediation that characterize the ‗new‘ services economy whereby
‗middlemen‘ in various service industry value chains are by-passed and service industries and
business models are altered and restructured. Importantly, these changes are ‗client-driven‘ to
the extent that people are choosing to use ‗new‘ media in new ways to get better services
and an expanded range of opportunities for social connection.
The aesthetics of classified advertising are also changing as the possibilities for creative
inputs are also expanded. In online environments classified advertising can be much more
that the analogue print-equivalent to short text messaging we presently associate with mobile
phones. In other words, the efficiency and productivity gains that capital can derive from the
adoption of networked communications are only one aspect of a far larger story of complex
social change.
The online classifieds services have been growing at a scorching pace globally as well as in
India. Classifieds have been a perennial source of revenue to newspapers most of which
invariably have classified columns. From the old to the new media, online classifieds services
have emerged to cater to myriad purposes:
Hunting for jobs, buying used cars, looking out for rented apartments, seeking life partners or
even establishing intimate personal relations. The variety of uses expand to cover hitherto
untouched areas such as online education, online web logging or blogging, social and
business networking, travel, and so on.

THE FUTURE OUTLOOK

The future of an Internet-based services company is intricately linked to the Internet at one
end and to the markets they serve at the other. Growing Indian economy, rising Internet
penetration, and increasing sophistication of usage are positive features on the horizon.
Mounting competition from late-movers leveraging on the advantages of latest technologies
is a big threat. Print media that is going to take the major brunt of movement of classified
advertising to online classifieds services may hit back by more aggressively going online
itself and installing search engines to make their own versions of online classifieds services.
Recruitment services markets are likely to remain strong as most companies are growing and
attrition rates in some industries are high requiring continual replenishment of human
resources. Naukri.com retains its premier position and horizontal growth in terms of
geography as well as vertical growth in terms of service repertoire offers good prospects. Yet,
downturns in the recruitment markets, as have happened with the IT and ITES markets do
hurt the prospects. Stunted economic growth hurts the employment markets badly and
Naukri.com suffers. In recent years, the revenue from Naukri.com has been growing far more
slowly than other ventures of Info Edge combined. Competitors may be behind but almost all
of them are part of business groups that are larger than Info Edge.
Matrimonial service markets are likely to experience tough competition from existing players
as well as new entrants. Jeevansathi.com remains a laggard being at third place among
competitors and with just 13 per cent market share of the Rs. 300 crore-market in 2013. Real
estate service markets are still relatively less explored and thus offer good prospects but with
considerable challenges ahead. 99acres.com is doing well with leading the market at about 40
per cent share of the Rs. 150 crore-market in 2013.

Opportunities exist or could emerge for developing businesses in future. Shiksha.com the
prospective education portal about which not much is known as yet may prove to be another
winner for Info Edge. The creation of new ventures related to business networking modelled
on LinkedIn and expansion of offline of- ferings of the Company remain top priorities.
Since Info Edge is a public company, its success is closely watched. The business metrics
may not really be technical such as number of hits on the portals but the share value on the
stock exchanges. Serendipity has played a big role at times in Naukri.com‘s success: the
funding came when it was required so badly; and it came just before the dotcom bust
happened in 2000; Bikhchandani could get dedicated and commit- ted partner and retains
almost all of them. But there were failures too: Indiaventure2000 and Roltanet were started in
2000 and had to be closed down. For the first five years, Info Edge did not launch resume
database services that today accounts for a major part of its revenue.

The entrepreneurial zeal of the tough survivor of the dotcom bust Sanjeev Bikhchandani lives
on though considerably muted with ageand experience. He is considered nowto be more of an
ideas man and the public face of Naukri.com while members of the management team led by
Hitesh Oberoi, COO, run the day-to-day show. The ambition to make Info Edge a ‗world-
scale‘ company remains to be fulfilled. Sanjeev Bikhchan- dani has become an inspiration to
budding Indian entrepreneurs.

Digital space in India is attracting increasing attention and investments in recent years.
Competition is becoming more intense. Expectations of customers are on the rise.
Technology is also changing fast. India‘s internet-driven economy is expected to grow by
over Rs. 10 trillion by 2018 according to Internet and Mobile Association of India and its
contribution to the national GDP is also likely to grow. India is among three world‘s
countries where seven Internet companies have a billion plus dollars valuation. Info Edge is
among them along with MakeMyTrip.com, Justdial, Flipkart, Snapdeal.com, Partm.com and
InMobi.com.

Looking back, Sanjeev Bikhchandani has this to say: ―We not only created wealth but also
built an institution‖. Is it a tall claim or a realistic assertion? Only time can tell