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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (4441)	6/8/1999 11:33:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Respond to of 12475

IndiaWorld Seeks Investors for Its Popular Cricket, News Sites indiaworld.co.in Bloomberg News June 6, 1999, 8:15 p.m. PT IndiaWorld Seeks Investors for Its Popular Cricket, News Sites Mumbai, June 7 (Bloomberg) -- Rajesh Jain, managing director of IndiaWorld Communications, which manages some of the most popular Indian Internet sites, is seeking investors in India and the U.S., saying it has what most sites only dream of -- profits. The $5 million he hopes to raise from the stake sale will be used to attract more Indians to IndiaWorld sites, which provide everything from cricket statistics to travel tips about camel-back tours in the desserts of Rajasthan. In the next three years Jain hopes to list his company,mimicking the success of Starmedia.com, a Spanish and Portuguese website which also focuses on web surfers largely ignored by the U.S.-based Internet leaders. Starmedia raised $98 million last month selling stocks in the U.S. and pushing the value of the company to $744 million. ''We have the potential to take what we have and make it into a billion dollar business by 2005,'' when as many as 100 million Indians may be using the Internet, said Jain, who started the company four years ago. IndiaWorld, who's 11 sites get more than 10 million hits a month from more than 250,000 regular users, programs popular sites, including the Khel.com for sports news and Samachar.com for Indian news. Its revenues more than doubled to $450,000 in the year ended March, Jain said. He would not reveal the company's profit, but said the company is in the black. As with most Internet companies, IndiaWorld is betting that explosive growth in Internet use will translate into millions of dollars of business in the near future. The number of Internet users in Asia outside of Japan will expand 35 percent a year until 2003 to reach 57.5 million, market researcher International Data Corp., or IDC, said. IDC estimates that the Internet commerce market in Asia outside of Japan will climb to $33 billion by 2003 from $724 million last year. Among the region's markets, Australia was the biggest last year with $432 million in Internet commerce but China and India will lead the market by 2003 with the number of users, IDC said. India's National Association of Software and Service Companies predicts that India will have 2.6 million Internet users by the end of this year, up from 535,000 at the end of 1998. Jain predicts that as many as one in ten of India's population of one billion will be using the Internet regularly by 2005 as computers become less expensive and those that can't afford computers will use Internet Kiosks, where they will pay a fee to use the Net. 'The potential for growth is phenomenal in India,'' said Jayesh Parekh, analyst at SMIFS Securities Ltd. in Mumbai. ''I'm not saying all of India's one billion people will be on line but even if a small part of the urban population start using the net it will be a big market.'' Granted, IndiaWorld has tough competition from other sites aimed at Indians including, Rediff.com, Satyamonline.com, the U.S.-based IAOL.com, not to mention global leaders such as Yahoo!, which plans to launch a site for Indians. Still, IndiaWorld said it's confident that it will continue being one of India's most popular sites. For the first time ever, its sites recorded more than one million hits on some days last week as the conflict in Kashmir and the World Cup of cricket meant more Indians weren't satisfied with their regular sources of news. 'I don't think the other web sites are going to come close,'' to our popularity with Indians, Jain said. ''There's no reason anymore for someone to go to Yahoo or CNN to find out about India.'' news.com

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (4441)	6/8/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 12475

US Congman tells Sharif to pull out invaders ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Aziz Haniffa Washington Senior US Congressman Benjamin Gilman has held Pakistan wholly culpable for the current crisis along the Line of Control (LoC) and has asked Islamabad to immediately withdraw its mercenaries from Kargil. Mr. Gilman, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, in a sharply-worded letter to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said : "I am writing to express my alarm and regret over the recent Pakistan military action across the Loc in Kashmir." The lawmaker wrote that "the insertion of a large Pakistan-supported military force across the LoC threatens the peace and stability of South Asia." Mr. Gilman warned Mr. Sharif that "Pakistan has nothing to gain by permitting the fighting to continue and much to lose by prolonging the crisis. I urge you to instruct Pakistan's military forces to withdraw and to end its support for the current fighting," he added. Mr. Gilman said it was unfortunate that Pakistan had precipitated the latest tension between India and Pakistan, particularly since the warming of relations seemed promising after the recent bus diplomacy and the Lahore Declaration that followed. "It is discouraging that the current activity threatens to tarnish that well-deserved reputation," Mr. Gilman said in his missive. IANS indiagov.org