Plans tie-up with Indian telecom service operators, increase its employee strength in the country
Arkadin, one of the global majors in audio and web conferencing today announced its aggressive plans for the Indian market which include increasing its employee strength in India from 45 to 60 by 2011 and tie-ups with Indian telecom service operators.
The market for audio and video conferencing in Asia-Pacific has exhibited double digit year-on-year growth rate of 11.9% to reach the US$ 402.9 million mark in value terms in 2009 and it is expected to catapult to US$ 770 million by 2016 as per the recent Frost & Sullivan report. The declining prices are one of the biggest growth factors. According to the report, Asia-Pacific consumed 2993.1 million minutes of usage (audio and video conferencing) in 2009.
When it comes to India, Frost & Sullivan research reports that the revenues from video conferencing (US$ 8 million) and audio conferencing (US$ 24.8 million) put together were US$ 32.8 million in 2009 and collectively they are expected to reach the US$ 86.4 million by 2016 (US$ 16.8 million for video conferencing and US$ 69.6 million for audio conferencing).
Mr. Olivier de Puymorin, founder and CEO of Arkadin said, “India is a strategic market for Arkadin. Indian businesses are increasingly using conferencing as it results in time and resource management and of course, cost savings. We see an immense business potential here and our business is poised to grow considering the fact that the Indian economy is getting stronger by the day, business environment is favorable and the research indicates that the market size (for audio and video conferencing put together) is going to get almost tripled in 2016 than what it was about an year back. All of this gives us more credible reasons for eyeing the Indian market aggressively.”
The company had started its Indian operations in 2008 in partnership with ConferIndia and since then it has expanded its direct office network in the country to Noida, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Pune. Arkadin ConferIndia now has 600 plus customers in India which include names of repute like Pepsico, Nokia, Volvo, Suzlon, Bharti, Whirlpool, Aditya Birla Group, Shell, L&T etc. The Company also established its 24x7 global customer support centre in Noida besides local access from 15 cities in India.
The tie-up with the Indian telecom service operators shall be in accordance with its recent strategic agreement with SingTel in Singapore wherein SingTel shall exclusively offer Arkadin’s audio and web conferencing and collaboration solutions for its WorldConference virtual meeting service to all its customers in Singapore. ArkadinAnytime™, ArkadinEvent™ and ArkadinAnywhere™ audio and web conferencing solutions will be offered under SingTel’s WorldConference brand as SingTel Anytime, SingTel Anywhere and SingTel Event.
Arkadin is one of the biggest conferencing service providers in the world, growing at a healthy rate of 65% yearly since 2003 (organic growth). It has more than 14000 active enterprise customers across the world of which 120 are Fortune 500 companies. Arkadin provides conferencing services in 15 languages, has 700+ employees worldwide, 44 offices in 26 countries and global turnover of 100 million Euros (approx. Rs 614 crores). The Company ploughs back 8% of its revenue into research and innovation. It has also won the Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Award for 2010 (Asia Pacific Growth Strategy Leadership Award – Conferencing Services Market) recently.
