April 2, 2000
The Week

The one-stop shop

It was success from the world go for Rohan Ajila, managing director of indiamarkets.com.  Since he launched his business-to-business site in December 1999, more than 11,000 people have registered and 150 are signing up every day, that too from towns like Jalandhar and interiors of Gujarat.

"Once you come here, you don't have to go anywhere else," says Ajila. An MBA from the University of Houston, Ajila worked with the Houston chamber of Commerce, and Crisil before launching his site.

indiamarkets.com essentially offers business services like supplier listings, buyers' postings, and auctions for second-hand machinery. "It's not just an investment information provider, but a facilitator of transactions," says Ajila. The site, which has more than 130 product categories, attracts 2,500 companies daily.

Going online took Ajila just over a year, and his 30-member team expects to have 100,000 registered users of the site by the end of the year. The site's Asian Small Industries Millennium 2000 Fair attracted 1,300 visitors in two weeks.

Ajila plans to plough his profits into setting up 70 industrial cafes across the country to provide training and services to those who do not know how to conduct business online.  "The aim is to penetrate the interiors and not just the metros," he says.

The company has tied up with bplnet.com - the site that handles BPL's Internet wing - and Max Page, the paging service of Hutchison Max Telecom."Businessmen can now get answers to their business queries on a pager," explains Ajila

With technology growing at an exponential rate, Ajila is unsure where he will be 10 years down the line. "I'am only sure of one thing," he says. "I'll be keeping pace with it".