Electricmela.com, claiming to be India's first business-to-business portal on the electric industry, is expecting a revenue of Rs 200 crore-Rs 250 crore by the first two years of its operations.
"We are very optimistic about our growth potential and we are expecting about Rs 200 crore-250 crore in revenue after the first two years of our operations," B K Sethi, chief executive officer and co-founder of electricmela.com told Business Standard yesterday.
"Our portal will reduce the transaction cost for sellers and will also bring down the total cost of purchase for buyers," Sethi said.
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The portal is promoted by Verticalbiz.com Ltd, a company that was formed by spinning off the e-commerce division of EMCO Ltd.
Revealing that the initial funding of Rs 10 crore came from EMCO Ltd, Sethi said, "We are now looking at venture capital funding for future investments."
Targeted at the over Rs 45,000-crore electrical industry in India, electricmela.com already has companies like Blue Star, Larsen & Toubro and Siemens as subscribers of its services. Negotiations are on with Cromp-ton Greaves and ABB as well.
The site offers a listing of about 30,000 categories of products and also provides information on over 3,500 companies, 1,000 dealers and a host of other value added services.
Sethi is expecting to generate revenues through the commission that electricmela.com will charge for hosting services like M-shops digital brochures, display of new products and online auctions. The company is negotiating with a leading bank to finalise its payments system.
For the auction, it will operate through an escrow account, a system by which customers will deposit money with the bank, and the bank will transfer it to the sellers' account, once the buyer confirms that he has received the product.
For the M-shops, (new products sales counter), the company is planning to launch security certificates. They will first make sure that the buyer has adequate money in his account. Later, the money will be transferred to the seller's account through a payment gateway.
`M-shop' enables dealers and manufacturers to display their products and services on the portal instead of providing a simple hyper-link.