Market maker

“It’s been blood, sweat and tears,” says Rohan Ajila of his experience at setting up indiamarkets.com, a B2B portal for manufacturers. “But it’s been very rewarding,” adds the 33-year-old managing director of the venture. Rewards have come not only in the form of positive response from the manufacturing community, but from the increasing number of registrations as well; at last count there were as many as 20,000, which Ajila attributes to a “clear first mover advantage” and a committed team of people working on it.

Ajila noticed the lack of relevant real-time information of and to manufacturers while he was doing his internship at the Houston Chamber of Commerce as part of his MBA programme at the University of Houston. Back in India in 1993, Ajila worked as an analyst with Crisil, following it up with a haul as an investment banker at TAIB Capital Corporation. In the late 1990s, with the advent of the Net, he saw a huge opportunity to fill up the gap that he had felt during his student days. That’s how indiamarkets.com came to be launched last December.

Right now Ajila is working hard towards making indiamarkets.com a one-stop shop for manufacturers wanting to source products from India, making it a truly worldwide web. That takes up about 16 hours of his time each day. “The Net is a very possessive and powerful medium, so I don’t mind the compromise,” he says. Which also means that he has no time for the family business, Haldyn Glass. But then no one’s complaining yet.