Word: indiaworld
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Rajesh Jain made one of India's biggest business deals of 1999--and ran. Before the score that netted him $115 million, Jain, 32, operated a website known as IndiaWorld, which posted local news and sports scores, primarily for Indians living overseas. His 20 staff members were squeezed into a 970-sq-ft. warren in downtown Bombay. Profits were minimal. But last fall Jain hit a cosmic payday when he sold his portal company, IndiaWorld Communications, to Satyam Infoway, an Indian Internet service provider listed on NASDAQ. The $115 million deal--one of the biggest Internet transactions involving two Asian...
...what Silicon Valley has known for a long time: though going public is a fabulous way to cash in on the Internet, selling out to someone else can be a sure-fire moneymaker too. Satyam Infoway wanted content popular with overseas Indians to complement its own domestically oriented portal. IndiaWorld was pulling most of its 13 million monthly page views from outside the country. Jain got an unusual windfall because Satyam Infoway is paying the entire purchase price in cash, not in stock, which is more typical in such deals. His initial investment...
...bespectacled Jain set up IndiaWorld the same year with money saved from his job. "I wrote my business plan on Post-it notes," he jokes. The site was built almost entirely using public domain software, such as the free Linux platform, and it was maintained on widely available Apache servers. "In our entire five years, we bought only three software packages--Windows, Office and Photoshop," he boasts...
...first two years were spent persuading advertisers to take a flyer. Typically, IndiaWorld managed to grow handily in terms of hits while its profit last year was an imperceptible $58,000. But IndiaWorld earned buzz, and Jain suddenly found himself courted by angel investors, foreign venture capitalists and banks eager to lend. In the end, he decided to get out of the game entirely by selling to Satyam Infoway, one of the largest Internet service providers in India, which doesn't allow foreign competition in the field. "We already have a substantial audience in India," says chief executive R. Ramaraj...
Satyam Infoway now claims 30 million page views a month, and its share price has doubled since the IndiaWorld purchase. The deal helped kick off an Internet frenzy among Indian entrepreneurs and financiers, which has been fanned by New Delhi's public commitment to develop India's information-technology sector. Dotcoms are sprouting across the country, spurred additionally by the entry of big international investment funds. Some Indian-born Silicon Valley programmers and engineers are finally coming home to put their skills to use. But Jain has been happy just to put his money in the bank...
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