CMIE eyeing global markets for expansion

The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) is eyeing global markets for corporate earning forecasting product. It is also expanding its activities in the domestic market.

This includes more frequent household surveys about habits and trends for savings and investments.

CMIE is a three-decade-old macroeconomis and agriculture crop forecasting, family-owned organisation. It is reputed for its various data base and industry forecast.

Next month, CMIE will introduce corporate earning forecasting products covering large number of Indian companies. Very soon the institute will do the same for international companies.

Confirming this, Mahesh Vyas, MD & CEO, CMIE, said "As a strategy we are expanding to global scale and instead of becoming KPO company, we would like to have our own global brand and forecasting business."

Currently, the centre is working out various options. It has a huge data base but for international companies it will either have to buy data base or may have to tie up with some global organisation.

"We are looking at suitable options. We have basic know-how and are working out details," said Vyas.

The centre has already started doing households' survey on their saving and investment habits. "We will cover one lakh households and will do the survey every six month," he said. Surveys will cover all income groups, all geographical areas, urban and rural, and the results will be out in a month. Around 400 small and big cities will be covered. It will find out changing consumption patterns, purchases, including consumer durables, investments in financial instruments, including future plans.

Earlier, NCAER had done such survey a few years ago. National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) does such work on a bigger scale but the results come very late and they do it only for the government and findings are not available to others.

CMIE's project will assume importance as it will do such large survey on a regular basis. Vyas said "result of first such survey will be out soon and it will help in judging the household's habits and future plans. We will use technology to see that the results of the surveys are out in a month."

The centre is also introducing the pay-as-you-use concept for its data base and forecast. Every thing will be available on the web and charges will be limited to the data used.

Currently, users have to pay subscriptions for whole products and there are many different products which have to be subscribed separately.

The CMIE will now bundle their products and will be sold as one product while charges will be limited to the use and all data on web will provide user the flexibility to use data as and when he wants to use.