"In a country like India non-digital never dies": GETIT's Bindra

GETIT Infoservices announced the acquisition of Infomedia Yellow Pages and AskMe from Network18 last week. This came close on the heels of GETIT roping in former senior Microsoft hand Jaspreet Bindra as CEO. He quit Microsoft in February, 2012 and took a year’s sabbatical. An interview to understand the acquisition which has created a 2,000-employee company:

Edited Excerpts

I see it more as a merger of two large entities in the directional media space rather than as an acquisition. There are three reasons for this. First: traditionally, GETIT has been much stronger in the four southern states in addition to Rajasthan and some parts of the East. Infomedia, on the other hand, has had a strong presence in the West and the North. Clearly, the merger increases our geographic presence considerably.

Second, 70 per cent of GETIT's revenue today is digital rather than print since we have been up-selling digital products to the same base of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) and customers that we have from print. Now, the merger brings with it a host of SMEs through Infomedia's database. Also, while its presence has largely been print-led, almost 15-20 per cent of Infomedia's revenues is digital too. So, together we have a massive opportunity to upsell digital products to this new base.

Third, in today's digital world, no one is a complete friend or an enemy. It thrives on partnerships and GETIT has always been the 'partnering' company. GETIT has been Google's largest partner in this space; the local search page of Yahoo! is powered by GETIT and so is mBazaar of Airtel. Therefore, to again get in a new set of databases with expanded geographies becomes a lot easier.

In a country like India, analog or non-digital never dies. Newspapers are only growing; magazines are launched almost every fifteen days. Certainly, yellow pages are no longer the super high growth and super profitable businesses they used to be but they are growing. So, even while we talk about digital being the future, at least for the next 5-10 years, the print business will continue to coexist; and in the smaller cities of India it will thrive much longer.

Having said that, I don't think we should be typecast into being a yellow pages business or a digital listings or a local search business. Those are our products. The business that GETIT is getting into is to digitally empower SMEs and help them get discovered by their customers.

There are about 30 million SMEs in India who contribute 40 per cent of India's exports and 17-18 per cent of India's GDP. All want to reach out and find customers and they can find them in various ways. Yellow pages is just one of them. Being on search engines (both local and global), having websites, presence on social platforms and being on mobile apps are the other ways. GETIT is into all of these. This is the business that we are into and when you overlay that, the world is slightly different from the way in which we have been traditionally perceived.

Think about the US from an online market perspective. There is Google and there is also the smaller Yahoo Bing!, there is Yelp, there is Craigslist and 25-30 odd matrimonial sites along with 100 other real estate sites. And all are doing well within their own space.

The market in India is large enough for everyone to exist. Today, all the local search providers put together, address one million out of the 30 million SMEs. So, there is this massive B2B opportunity waiting to be addressed.

There are three kinds of models that work for the internet. The first is advertising-led wherein the advertiser pays and the consumer gets it free. The second is ecommerce and the third is the freemium model wherein, if there are 100 customers, only 3-4 pay while the rest are free - for example, LinkedIn.

So, unlike an OLX-like business which is supported by advertising, GETIT works on the freemium model. So, what an OLX-like business has to do to reach out to its audiences is different from what GETIT needs to. Our audiences are the SMEs. Hence, GETIT's advertising is more SME focused and therefore, advertising is mostly online. But eventually, as we absorb the acquisition and build the brand, we will spend on brand building which will be above the line, but only when the time is right.

The combined entity currently stands at Rs 130-140-crore mark and going forward, we want to become a Rs 200-crore plus company by the end of this financial year.