Info Edge: What's Working Beyond Naukri

Naukri.com has worked wonders for Info Edge. But can its success be replicated at the company’s other ventures?

- Sayan Chakraborty

He helms an almost 20,000-crore (by market capitalisation) public company that has diligently churned out profits every quarter, for a decade, a rarity among homegrown internet businesses. That this has been achieved with a measly 7 crore in venture capital (VC) funding is an even bigger rarity in India, where chasing investors to clinch billion-dollar fundings almost every year is as much a part of a unicorn CEO’s job as running the office.

But ask Hitesh Oberoi, 46, chief executive and managing director at Info Edge, if the company’s cash counters were ringing right from the beginning, and he says, “At that time, nobody really understood how to make money.”

The time that Oberoi refers to is circa 2000, when he quit his job at Hindustan Unilever to launch Baachao.com, an online deals platform, with Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder and executive chairman of Info Edge. Bikhchandani had started the company in 1994, and had only one offering—Naukri.com, launched in 1997—when Oberoi joined him. This was an India where high speed internet was a pipe dream, and venture capital a novelty. The likes of MakeMyTrip, Indiaplaza and Contests2win, the early birds of India’s dotcom story, were beginning to take wings, but it wasn’t clear how long their flight would last.

The US markets, however, were a different story. The dotcom bubble was only growing bigger, with companies such as search engine eXcite, and grocery delivery startups Kozmo and Webvan. Bikhchandani and Oberoi could only hope that some of that enthusiasm would spill over to India as well.