Power of Scaling – width and depth of vertical matters in India

So today after using justdial umpteenth time (and the umpteenth  time I got same result from phone which I already searched in the web which shows that the operators themselves search same db which makes me wonders why I even call them?), I just spent some comparing various successful web businesses in India (we can call it new media though its adulterated term but hey, we are talking about India here)

So in terms of evaluation, I think naukri, shaadi and justdial were almost same back in 2006 (in the range of 50M to 125M being the market leader in their vertical and potential of future growth), now in 2009, they naukri and shaadi might have become 2x (actually I don’t see much growth potential in naukri unless they stop selling their db and themselve take over of this recruiting work which they should had done along time back to cut on the middleman). So where naukri and shaadi have grown 100% in last 3 years (approx), I bet justdial grew 4x to 5x and they can maintain the same pace with for next 5 years tapping on the 490 million indian phone users.

And its not only about growth but also about revenue streams, shaadi dont’ have too many option, they have to charge fro premium service (they can probably start charging on volume basis to make more revenue, like a person can call 100 ppl only and need to pay more for calling more profiles etc), similar with naukri, both of them need to offer more services for higher revenue and to move to next strep.

for justdial, well they have tons of revenue streams which they haven’t tapped on. I mean God, USA has multi billion dollar lead generation business, now in India, because of extremely slow growth of broadband thanks to poor last mile service and because of low priority of broadband usage among service providers (they prefers to focus more on mobiles) India only has 80 million broadband users. Now comparing 80 million to 490 million, just dial owns Everything!!! and by own, I mean properly own (snatch reference)

The company should hit a billion dollar evaluation in coming years easily which brings us to the main point of this post, Scaling matters in India.

PS – a friend of mine, Porush (check out his blog, he has good stuff there) said that merging online and offline will give you more chances of success, makes sense. I think merging multiple media is also a option to look for.