Crowded skies or crowded online travel space?

Following up on my earlier post on online travel space , here is an updated compilation of the travel players who have either launched their offerings or have announced the same.

Operational sites

Indiatimes Travel
MakeMyTrip
Travelguru
Xplorz : (Promoted by Tulip Travels)
Thomas Cook
Mobissimo : Fare search & redirect to airline for booking fulfilment
Rediff Fare Search : Fare search & redirect
Traveljini : Tavel content


Launch announced

Yatra
Cleartrip
Ezeego1 – Cox and Kings, read more
Travelocity India : read more
Sify's acquisition of Globe travels : read more (Updated : 6th June 2006)

This makes it more than a dozen sites already and counting ! Any wagers on who will survive ?

Online education: A big opportunity

A business is likely to do well in the online space when

1. It meets a need that offline businesses cannot provide or is able to provide a more efficient and convenient experience to the consumer
2. The demand and supply of a product or a service is very disorganized, fragmented and geographically scattered.

With majority of India’s population below the age of 25, education is a huge business. It also fits very well in the online space by clearly scoring over offline education in terms of:

Convenience:

- Very easy for a student to reach out to a good teacher from within confines of his/her home
- Provides help on a 24/7 basis.

Disorganised & Scattered Demand (students) – Supply(teachers)

On one side good quality teachers are concentrated in few geographical areas / institutes / colleges & schools. On the other side there are students from all over the country who want to get into a good school / college / institute.

Kota in Rajasthan is a very good example where the entire eco-system of the town has been built around thousands of students staying in the town for almost a year to prepare for engineering examinations by enrolling in one of the numerous engineering entrance coaching institutes of the likes of Bansals etc.

As we will see the internet connectivity expand to smaller towns and speeds improve, online education should grow extremely rapidly. Currently there are very few players concentrating on online education

I have recently led Indiatimes’ foray into education by launching testing services for all competitive examinations under the brand Indiatimes Mindscape Test Centre. We would like to eventually offer a full services education portal, with a whole range of content and service offerings, right from school to post graduation.

Related links

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1517139.cms

http://www.alootechie.com/News/1006.asp

Online Stock broking on way to becoming billion dollar business

Annual results of India Infoline have left me pleasantly surprised. The earnings reported have tripled from Rs.75 crores in last fiscal 2004-05 to a whopping Rs.218 crores in the current year ending March 31st 2006.

India Infoline’s CFO Ravi Krishnan, in an interview to CNBC-TV18 has stated that 2/3rd of the entire income comes from Brokerage business! This translates to almost Rs.150 crores from brokerage income for the year.

There are only 2 listed online stock broking companies in India, India Infoline & Indiabulls, this makes estimating the market size a little difficult. However, I would estimate India Infoline’s market share at around 7-8% of the total online stock broking business. This translates to a total market size of around Rs.2,000 crores ($450 m). I had in my previous post estimated the last year market size to be around 500 crores. This makes online stock broking business clearly the largest and fastest growing Internet business in India. This business should be crossing billion $ mark in the next 12-18 months.

ICICI Direct, HDFC Securities & Sharekhan are the leaders in this space.


Related links

http://markets.moneycontrol.com/stocks/cptmarket/pricechart.php?sc_did=II15

http://markets.moneycontrol.com/stocks/stock_market/coprannounce.php?sel_comp=II15

The details of the press release of India Infoline are available on the NSE website (http://www.nseindia.com) under: Corporates > Latest Announcements.

Online Listings / Classifieds businesses in India

This business is a personal favourite. I believe that the achievement of scale in this segment has led various stakeholders to reaffirm their belief in the Indian Internet space !

The estimated size of online classifieds business is around US$ 55 million (INR 250 crores). It today is one of the larger online business segments in India and is growing at more than 100% y-o-y. In fact it is already started posing grave threat to the growth of the print business which is growing at a more sedate pace of 10-15%.

I am putting some of my estimated numbers:

Jobs / Recruitment
Print : Rs. 100 crores
Online: Rs. 200 crores

Total Classifieds business
Print: Rs. 500 crores
Online: Rs. 250 crores

Advertising revenues
All media: Rs. 12,000 crores
Online: Rs. 400 crores (including online classifieds)

Key takes from the above:

• Online classifieds business (Rs 250 crores) is larger than online advertising business wihtout classifieds (Rs. 150 crore)
• Online ad industry is just 3.3% of total ad industry. Whereas online classifieds are already 33% of the total classifieds business.
• Online classifieds as percentage to total online advertising at 62.5% is disproportionately large when we compare it with classifieds as percentage of total media advertising volumes which is at just 4.3%.
• Online jobs as a category is double the size of print already!
  

What is making online classifieds grow this fast? Two main reasons - firstly online medium helps fulfils the need better in classifieds space than the offline medium. Secondly, and more important is the aggressive sales approach taken by the online classifieds players. They have put a humongous number of feet-on-street to solicit listings from all kind of recruiters starting from large companies down to small businesses. Currently there will be more than 1,000 people selling listings of various jobs portals across the country.

It will remain interesting to observe the growth rates over the next 1-2 years of both print as well as online classifieds.

Update : 10th April 2006

TV18 acquires 50% in JobStreet India For $2 Million : Content Sutra

Related Link

http://www.contentsutra.com/the-state-of-indias-online-classifieds-market