Sanjay Trehan has been elevated to the position of chief executive, Internet, Hindustan Times.

When Trehan joined Hindustan Times in March 2001 as general manger, Internet, he was entrusted with the task of revamping the website hindustantimes.com and decide on the fate of go4i.com. Among the first things to go at the Internet division was go4i.com. Then on, Trehan's mission has been to make hindustantimes.com 'a site to reckon with'.

Trehan says, "I am really excited about my appointment." However, coping with the last two years hasn't been easy. "When I joined in 2001, I inherited a demoralised team. We were 91 people here and the company was burning Rs 50 lakh per month. The site would get 3 million page views," says Trehan.

All that has changed now. "Today we are a 54-member team, the burn rate is down to half (that is, Rs 25 lakh) and we get 90 million page views." The dotcom closed its books last year with a turnover of Rs 2 crore. Trehan is confident his venture will break even by March 2004.

Part of his confidence stems from the plans ahead of him. In the pipeline are a slew of standalone portals, which Trehan hopes would turn out to be big revenue grossers. One of the portals is the US edition of the hindustantimes.com, similar to the UK edition. The other three portals include hindustandainik.com, which is the online version of the Hindi daily, Hindustan, a city-specific portal htcitywise.com (that will give in-depth news of eight cities including Lucknow, Delhi, Kolkata, Jaipur and Chandigarh), and the third being htclassifieds.biz, which will contain four independent vortals such as htmatrimonial.com, htautomobiles.com, htcareer.com and htrealestate.com.

Bangalore-based consultants MindTree has already put together the user interface, design and technology for the new portals.