IMB 917

NAUKRI.COM (A): THE BUSINESS OF INTERNET IN INDIA

KSHITIJ SAXENA, MEDHAVI CHANDRA, ANKUSH KOCHHAR AND

SURESH BHAGAVATULA

Kshitij Saxena, Adjunct Faculty & Founder and GP, Relentless Ventures, Medhavi Chandra, Research Associate, Ankush Kochhar,
Research Associate, and Suresh Bhagavatula, Professor of Entrepreneurship, IIMB, prepared this case for class discussion. This
case is not intended to serve as an endorsement, source of primary data, or to show effective or inefficient handling of decision
or business processes. All direct quotes without references in the end notes are from interviews conducted by the case writers.

Copyright © 2022 by the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. No part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (including internet) – without the
permission of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

It was February 2020 and Hitesh Oberoi, MD and CEO of Info Edge, had just completed an earnings call with public
investors and analysts to discuss the company’s financial performance for the previous quarter. Info Edge was India’s
largest Internet classifieds company and operated Naukri.com (classifieds for jobs), 99Acres.com (real estate
classifieds), Jeevansaathi.com (matrimonial classifieds), Shiksha.com (higher education classifieds) and other
business units in allied spaces (Exhibit 1). Info Edge also had a very successful venture investment arm, which had
been the first investor in Zomato (restaurant listings and food delivery) and Policy Bazaar (insurance comparison
shopping), two of the most successful startups in India, both exceeding $1 Bn in valuation. At different points, Info
Edge had owned ~50% of both the startups.

As Oberoi walked out of the board room at the Info Edge headquarters in Noida, he reflected on the recent
performance of Info Edge – the company was doing very well, and the stock price had closed at its all-time high of
Rs 3,0781 (US $ 43.35) on Feb 7th (Exhibit 2).

However, Oberoi couldn’t help but think about the future – Naukri.com was the largest business operated by Info
Edge and brought in most of the profits for the company (Exhibit 3), but Google had entered the jobs space in India
in April 2018 with Google Jobs, and LinkedIn2 had grown at a blistering pace in India to reach 62 million members in
India by December 2019i.

Over the years, Naukri had faced immense competition and conquered it all to command more than 90% market
share of the online jobs classifieds market in India (Exhibit 4A/4B), so competition per se didn’t concern Oberoi.
However, competition with Google and LinkedIn seemed different – these were different beasts with very large
revenue pools (Exhibit 5). LinkedIn was not a classifieds service that competed head-on, but HR departments could
still use it to post jobs and find candidates. Whereas Google Jobs’ proposition was to aggregate jobs from classifieds
services like Naukri and show them up as the first item in Google Search when a user’s search query resembled a
search for a jobii; if a user tried to apply on such a job listing, Google would direct the user to the classifieds service
that had shared the listing. So far, Naukri hadn’t shared its job listings with Google Jobs but the proposition had been
discussed within the company.

As Oberoi walked to his office, he wondered if there was merit in cooperating with Google Jobs and whether LinkedIn
would become a direct competitor.

THE JOURNEY TO FIND THE “IDEA” OF NAUKRI.COM

Sanjeev Bikhchandani graduated from IIM Ahmedabad in 1989 with a marketing job at GlaxoSmithKline 3 to sell
Horlicks in India, a sweet-malted-milk-drink brand iii.

In 1989, India’s economy was still being described as the License Raj – one needed a government license to start and
run almost any kind of business and getting such a license involved enormous red tape, bribery and widespread
corruptioniv. This was not a good time to be an entrepreneur in India; and young, ambitious, hardworking students
like Bikhchandani, from India’s top educational institutes, either aspired to work for the government in the Indian
Administrative Service or Public Sector Undertakings4 or, to work for the few multi-national corporations that were
allowed to operate in India, like GlaxoSmithKline.

1
All US $ rates have been converted at the prevailing exchange rates on the date/month/year
2
Owned by Microsoft
3
At the time, the company was SmithKline Beecham, which later merged to become GlaxoSmithKline
4
Companies owned and operated by the Government

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Hence, the job that Bikhchandani had landed with GlaxoSmithKline was quite a coveted placement at IIM
Ahmedabad, but despite him coming from a middle-class Indian family 5, a corporate career simply wasn’t enough
for Bikhchandani’s ambition. Bikhchandani pointed out:

As an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, we all have a hunger for multinational companies. Because it’s
prestigious. But to my mind, it is false prestige. You are a prisoner of your visiting card and the logo on it. I
could see my future, had I continued as a manager in the corporate sector. If I was lucky, at the end of 5
years I’d be a Senior Product Manager, in 8 years, I’d be Marketing Manager… in 25 years, I’d be CEO
somewhere. All this, if I’d be really good. I asked myself: is this what I want in life? v

So, after a year on the job, in 1990, Bikhchandani left his corporate career to take a chance on his own destiny and
started Indmark. His initial idea was to build a physical database of trademarks 6, and offer companies the ability to
search through it before deciding trade names for their new products vi, all for a total of Rs 350 (US $ 20.6)7 per
searchvii. Indmark also offered assistance with trademark registration.

Bikhchandani’s initial days as an entrepreneur were difficult – there was a cash flow crisis every month before pay
day and while he could pay his employees, Bikhchandani himself had to take up multiple side jobs to make his own
salary – first as a teacher at business schools and CAT 8 preparation classesviii and later as the editor of the career
supplement at a newspaper.

In this grind, Bikhchandani’s initial idea changed drastically from trademark advisory to compiling salary surveys and
market surveys for corporate customers. By 1995, he had incorporated a new startup, Info Edge, to focus solely on
surveys and had left Indmark behind.

In 1996, Bikhchandani visited IT Asiaix, a trade fair in New Delhi where he found a stall with a banner that said
“WWW”. It was the stall of a reseller of VSNL 9 internet accounts with bundled email IDs. It was here that
Bikhchandani first learned about the Internet, about Yahoo!, and started to think about how this new technology
would change how everyone searched and found jobs.

At the time, companies that needed to hire people would advertise job openings with newspapers in the “classifieds”
supplement and people who wanted to apply for jobs would read the classifieds every day to figure out where to
apply. Bikhchandani was convinced that the new technology of the Internet was going to fundamentally change how
people searched for jobs. So, he started to figure out how to set up a website for posting jobs through the Internet.
But his efforts hit a wall when he learned that no one in India could set up a website in 1996 because all servers that
served websites at the time were physically located in the US. x

Luckily, Bikhchandani’s older brother was a Professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and agreed to
buy a shared server for Info Edge.

Soon after, Bikhchandani started collecting classifieds supplements of recognised newspapers from all over the
country and started uploading job postings from these newspapers into a database. Within a week, in April 1997,
Naukri.com was launched with a text-only interfacexi and with 1,000 live job postings – no job post was older than
30 days, and all jobs were taken from newspapers xii.

5
Bikhchandani’s father was a doctor at a government hospital and his mother, a homemaker.
6
An indexed physical register of trademarks in the country
7
US $ = Rs. 17 in 1990
8
CAT: Common Admission Test is the entrance examination for the MBA programs at any of the various Indian Institutes of Management (IIM)
9
VSNL was a PSU Internet Service Provider that had a monopoly on all internet connections in India till Nov 1998

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

At the time of Naukri’s launch in 1997, there were a total of 14,000 internet connections in India 10 (Exhibit 6). Most
connections involved slow, 56 kbps dial-up modems and were mainly used by employees at multinational
corporations or by India’s IT service companies to communicate with their customers abroad.

As Naukri started to witness some traffic on its website (Exhibit 7) from candidates looking for jobs, it started selling
the right to post a job on the website to companies’ HR departments and recruitment agencies (headhunters).
Initially, each job posting was priced at Rs 350 (US$ 9.60) and a subscription for Rs 6,000 (US$ 165) got a user the
right to make unlimited job postings for a year. Naukri’s revenue for its first year of operation was Rs 2.35 lakhs (US$
6475)xiii. The business grew 7.6X in its second year to bring in Rs 18 lakhs11 (US$ 49590) (in revenue, at which point
it broke even. Bikhchandani decided to shut down every other activity that Info Edge had been involved in – salary
reports, market surveys etc. to focus all of Info Edge’s efforts on Naukrixiv.

In 1999, Bikhchandani received inbound interest from venture capital funds but turned them down because he
thought Naukri would soon be making Rs 50 – 60 lakhs (US $ 116,120 – 139,340) in yearly revenues, which would be
enough for him.

RAISING VENTURE CAPITAL

Hitesh Oberoi graduated from IIM Bangalore in 1996 with a sales and distribution job at Unilever’s ice-cream division
in New Delhi12. Oberoi, like Bikhchandani, is also from a middle-class Indian family 13 but his foray into
entrepreneurship was a bit more calculated. Oberoi recalled:

In India, there has always been this concept of business families 14. If you grow up in a business family in
India, by the time you’re 20 or 21, you’re ready to start a business because you have learnt the skills to run
a business every day at the dining table. But the idea of professionals quitting their job to build businesses
in India was entirely new in the 1990s. What had happened was that IT Service companies like Infosys, HCL
and TCS had become very successful and gone public. These companies were set up by knowledge-
entrepreneurs, people who had a professional background [vis a vis a business-family background]. These
companies became role models for the entrepreneurs to come. And many professionals decided to take
the plunge. It was a trickle in the beginning. It is now a flood. But many of us felt that maybe there was a
way to build a business for yourself. And we took the plunge at that time.

When you go to a good college in India, like an IIM, you know that you are already in the top 0.1% of the
people out there. And in your head you know that even in the worst case scenario you will still get a job.
Somebody will hire you. Somebody will give you something to do. So there’s a minimum guarantee which
is assured because you’ve been to an IIM or an IIT. So therefore, I was willing to try my luck and take a little
bit of risk. If it doesn’t work out, we can always go back.

In 1999, Oberoi had invested his savings to buy his first Personal Computer, which had opened him to the possibilities
of the Internet and he had become convinced that he wanted to build a career in this new and exciting domain. He
had known Bikhchandani for some time and in February 2000, Oberoi left Unilever to take the plunge with
Bikhchandani.

10
India had 627 Mn Internet users by the end of 2019 (Kantar IMRB ICUBE 2019 Report)
11
In the South Asian numbering system 1 Lakhs = 100,000 (0.1 million) and 1 Crore = 100,00,000 (10 million)
12
Unilever was operating as Hindustan Lever at the time in India
13
Oberoi’s parents were employed with Public Sector banks in India
14
Colloquial; a family where the prime occupation of most of the members of a multi-generational family is a commercial enterprise, often
structured as a holding entity with separate business interests under it.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Oberoi’s timing couldn’t have been more critical – competition for Naukri emerged with a bang at the end of March
2000. A new startup, Jobsahead.com, had raised Rs 25 Crores (US$ 5.5 million) 15 in venture capitalxv from Chrys
Capital, a Mumbai-based VC fund, and launched its recruitment website with wide media coverage and TV
advertisements placed in the India-Pakistan-South Africa cricket tri-series in Sharjah, called the Coca-Cola Cup 16.
Their ad budget for the launch was twice Naukri’s annual revenue. xvi

Jobsahead was also a better product – while Naukri at the time was only a website for posting jobs, Jobsahead
launched a database where candidates could upload their resumes and HR could search this database of resumes.
This search gave instant gratification to HR vis a vis posting a job, which had a significant and unpredictable lag before
HR received resumes from interested candidates who applied after looking at a job posting. Oberoi said, “They were
better than us in every respect. That was when we decided to take the [VC] money.” xvii

The entry of Jobsahead forced the hands of Bikhchandani and Oberoi to seek venture capital and they raised Rs 7.29
Crores (US$ 1.6 million) from ICICI Venture17 in April 2000 for 15% of Info Edgexviii, valuing the company at Rs 41.31
Crores pre-money (US$ 9 million). That year, Info Edge had brought in Rs 36 lakhs (US$ 80,000) in revenue, which
meant that the trailing revenue multiple ascribed to the valuation was almost 115X. The investment was structured
in two equal tranches. The first tranche was received by Naukri in April 2000 and the second tranche would come
later, depending on Naukri’s performance. At the time of the investment, India had 2 million internet connections.
According to Oberoi:

The concept of venture capital was alien to India. However, because of the dotcom boom in the US, a few
VCs had set up shop in India and a few Indian Internet startups got funded. But this lasted for a very short
time, just 7 – 8 months from late 1999 to June 2000. After the dotcom bust in the US, all VC funding dried
up in India. And it dried up for many years. Many startups that got funded in 2000, died very soon because
they quickly spent the money they had raised hoping that they will be able to raise more money and that
the market would explode. But that didn’t happen.

Before investing in Naukri, ICICI Venture asked Bikhchandani and Oberoi for a business plan as part of their business
diligence process. Oberoi reminisced:

We were not ready. We couldn’t imagine at that time, from where we were, that we could build a very large
business. So, the business plan we sent them was a very conservative business plan. And they got back
saying that we can’t fund this business plan, ‘Your business plan is too conservative’!

It was so early that no one fully understood how the Internet would evolve, or how big this whole thing
could become. In 2000, there very few engineers in India who could code for the Internet. There were no
product managers or graphic designers in India. No one really understood, at least sitting in India, how the
Internet was going to evolve. Therefore we couldn’t forecast 5 or 10 years down the line.

The most expensive product in our portfolio in 2000 was priced at Rs 6,000 a year (US $ = 45). So we thought
if we could even get 10,000 customers, we would make 6 crores a year (US $= 1335113). So the maximum
we were able to project to reach over a 5-6 year period was 20 crores per year. And we thought even that
was a big stretch. But as luck would have it, over time, we added new products to our portfolio. Our most
expensive product soon started selling at 3 lakhs per year (US $=6675). It was 50 times of what we thought
was possible in 2000.

15
Chrys Capital and other investors owned 75% of Jobsahead after the investment
16
This was the most important annual sports event in India at the time
17
ICICI Information Technology Fund

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

ICICI Venture probably had more confidence in us than we had in ourselves at that time. So they said, ‘okay,
why don’t you just take the money and we will figure it out later’. A lot of the credit for the investment
should go to ICICI Venture because we really didn’t understand how it all worked.

The investment happened because ICICI Venture had a thesis: “Classifieds’ Replacement by Internet”. The
newspaper business in India was huge even in 2000. Newspapers brought in Rs 35.6 Bn xix (USD 792 Mn18,xx) in ad
revenue in 2000. The top newspapers – The Times of India, The Hindu and Hindustan Times had thick classifieds
supplements – career, matrimonial and real estate supplements, which were replete with ads. ICICI Venture believed
that a lot of this newspaper ad revenue would eventually move online to category leaders like Naukri. So, even
though Naukri was only charging Rs 350 (US $ = 7.7) per ad in 2000 when newspapers would charge lakhs, ICICI
Venture believed that this disparity would eventually end. Oberoi said, “The big story at that time was about
migrating print revenue online.”

However, within one month of their investment in Naukri, the dotcom bubble burst in the US and VC investment in
India dried up. Having submitted a conservative plan at the time of investment helped Naukri because at the time
of the 2nd tranche, Naukri had outperformed its conservative plan; so ICICI Venture couldn’t withhold the 2 nd tranche
even though the tech investing landscape had entirely collapsed in India.

SCALING UP

Before raising VC, all sales for Naukri were generated by either Bikhchandani or Oberoi meeting a customer face-to-
face and pitching; and all customer leads were generated by direct mail campaigns 19. Naukri hired its first
salesperson after the VC raise but early sales remained hard – HR managers needed to be educated about the
Internet itself before anyone could pitch Naukri’s services.

Oberoi recalled, “We had to go and talk to HR managers and recruitment managers to make them understand that
there is something called the Internet and you can use it for hiring. And it’s very cheap and very effective.”

Initially, Naukri hired low-cost salespeople, spending Rs 10,000 (US $ = 222) on salary and another Rs 10,000 on
office space, conveyance, computer use and phone usage for every salesperson every month. In return, within 3 – 4
months of joining Naukri, a salesperson would start selling 3–4 annual subscriptions every month and would break
even on his costs to the company. Even though this did not make a profit for the company initially, it got more jobs
on the Naukri website, which was good for the company because it made Naukri’s proposition more attractive for
candidates.

However, selling remained hard even for experienced salespeople because of two reasons: a) at that time in India,
businesses wouldn’t buy anything without a face-to-face meeting with a salesperson. This put a hard limit on
salesperson efficiency and most would stagnate at 8 – 10 new sales per month, and b) businesses were used to
advertising in newspapers through local ad agencies, which created the ad copy for them as well. So they were not
comfortable creating their own ads on the Naukri website. Hence, Naukri’s sales team had to pitch in – they would
receive jobs from customers on email, post them on the website, and, after a few days, collate all candidate
responses and send them back to the customer20.

Both these factors together meant that the only way for Naukri to make a salesperson more productive was to sell
more expensive products, or, in other words, to increase the ARPU (average revenue per user). Oberoi recalled:

18
1 USD = Rs 44.94 in 2000
19
Naukri sent out letters to recruitment agencies and HR managers introducing its services, which generated call backs from those interested
20
For many years, Naukri did not have a separate customer support team; salespeople were responsible for supporting their own customers.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Our clients needed a lot of help. Sometimes we had to do input jobs for them. Sometimes we had to short
list and send CVs21 to them physically because they didn’t have access to the Internet.

We didn’t have people to train people. We didn’t have an elaborate admin setup. We were very
entrepreneurial – we used to hire new people and take them on sales calls22 to get trained watching other
people sell. Then after a few days, the new hires got their targets with a very attractive incentive plan. We
didn’t have a CRM for years. The culture was, ‘Just go and sell. At least ensure that you make 4 sales calls a
day. Meet as many customers as you can. And continue to service them well because people needed a lot
of handholding’. People wanted to meet you face to face in India. People didn’t buy on the phone then.

To increase ARPU, Naukri took inspiration from the newspaper model. Newspapers charged for space –larger ads
cost more and there were extra charges for premium positioning (front page, last page etc). Short newspaper ads
started at Rs 5,000 and full-page ads cost Rs 50 lakhs. Emulating this strategy, the standard Naukri job posting for Rs
350 (called Naukri Classifieds) had a 512 character limit – 256 characters for job description and 256 characters for
eligibility criteria: ad buyers had to pay more for more characters.

Naukri supplemented this character-based pricing strategy by launching Hot Jobs and Great Places to Work. A Hot
Job posting had no character limit and allowed customers to put their company logo alongside the posting. Great
Places to Work was a branding product for companies to create a microsite within the Naukri website that they could
fully control. Both products were priced 10X to 20X more than Naukri Classifieds.

Next, Naukri launched a resume database product called Resdex in 2002 xxi along the lines of Jobsahead. Candidates
looking for a job could upload their resumes on Resdex, which would make them available to recruiters and HR
managers to search by various fields like education, skill set, work experience etc. Resdex was priced at Rs 1.5 lakhs
per year (US $ 3377) and became quite a hit with India’s burgeoning IT Service industry. In early 2000s, many IT
Service companies followed a ‘bodyshop’ strategy – these companies would find skilled IT personnel in India and
send them overseas on contract. This strategy required the ability to quickly search for candidates with a specified
skill set and recruit them, and a searchable resume database fit the problem really well. In 2019, Resdex accounted
for ~60% of Naukri’s revenues (Exhibit 8).

Launching Resdex also had an unexpected sales benefit – for the first time, Naukri’s salespeople were able to
demonstrate that Naukri had relevant resumes. During a sales call, customers could search for their specific
requirements on Resdex and it would invariably throw up thousands of matching resumes; this gave confidence to
customers that even the cheaper products of Naukri could deliver relevant candidates.

Further, Naukri began allowing all its four products – Naukri Classifieds, Hot Jobs, Great Places to Work and Resdex,
to be sold in monthly and quarterly bundles along with the standard annual bundle. As Oberoi remembered:

Suddenly the sales team now had a portfolio of products. So they could sell something for Rs 350 (US$ 7.8),
Rs 6000 (US $ 133), Rs 15000 (US $ 333), Rs 75000 (US $ 1700), all the way up to Rs 3 lakhs (US $=6674). For
every 10 customers who were buying Naukri Classifieds, there were one or two who were interested in
buying other, more expensive, products. Because they were still very cheap compared to what newspapers
were charging. Very, very cheap. So as a result the sales team became very productive – an average sales
person started bringing in Rs 1 lakh (US $ 2225) to Rs 1.5 lakh ( US $ 3337) every month. And that gave us
the confidence to expand the sales team massively (Exhibits 9 and 10).

21
Currciculum Vitae, synonym of “Resume”
22
A sales call is a face-to-face meeting with a prospect

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

In the non-IT markets, Job listings (Naukri Classifieds) used to sell more. In the IT markets, the database
product (Resdex) sold more. Over time, the database product started selling everywhere.

My instruction to the sales team at the time was, ‘You can sell whatever you want. Go by what the client
needs. Just reach out to as many people as you can. Present to them, demonstrate the product to them,
give them free trials. Just get them into the system somehow. Don’t let a meeting go waste. Get something
from that meeting even if it’s a Rs 350 (US $ 7.7) cheque. At least the guy is in our system now, we have a
chance of upgrading him at some point of time.

According to Pawan Goyal, CBO of Naukri:

In India, business is very personal. If someone buys something from a sales guy, when he has a problem, he
expects the sales guy to be the service guy as well. So, sales are driven by very personal relationships. Hence,
in Naukri, our sales guys also do service and are intimately involved. Our sales team is incentivized on the
actual collection of money, not just on invoicing, unlike most other sales teams. So, our sales guys don’t just
have a relationship with HR but to collect money on time, they need to have a much deeper relationship in
the organization, with procurement and finance as well.

Naukri’s sales incentive plan was based only on the total sales amount in a period and did not differentiate on which
products were sold by a salesperson. A “maximum” incentive was defined in theory and salespeople made 60% of
the maximum incentive on achieving their “stretch” target. Beyond that, they made 80% on achieving a “Jackpot”
target and 100% on achieving the “Super Jackpot” target. However, there was no cap in practice on the incentive
made by a salesperson in a period – salespeople even made 120% – 140% of their “maximum” incentive if they far
exceeded all their targets. The broad principle was that 1/3rd of a salesperson’s total compensation should be in the
form of performance incentives.

With multiple products to sell, Naukri’s business model became very scalable and Naukri started to bring in more
revenue every year. In September 2002, Naukri turned profitable and started investing in marketing to build its brand
- the first TV commercial was launched in September 2003. This increased focus on marketing got more candidate
resumes to Naukri, which got more jobs to Naukri, which got even more candidates to Naukri. This started a self-
reinforcing virtuous circle (Exhibit 11), or in other words, 2-sided network effects started to kick in for Naukri. Oberoi
clarified:

The virtuous circle is something we understood very early on. If you get the most jobs, you get the most job
seekers. If you get the most job seekers, you get the most placements and hiring happens through you. If
you get a lot of hiring happening through you, you get more jobs. In 2000, people did not talk about network
effects. The network effect terminology came in later. And this is how the media, newspapers and TV
channels also articulated it at the time. If you get more readers, you get more advertising. If you get more
advertising, you get more money to publish more, which gets you more readers.

Over time, Naukri built a large and profitable sales organization – about 75% of the work force historically has been
employed in Sales (Exhibit 10).

Talking about hiring and retaining the large sales workforce, Sharmeen Khalid, CHRO, Info Edge said:

People don’t leave companies, people leave bad bosses. The converse is that people stay not because of
the company but because of the boss. The manager is the glue around whom everything works. What
worked for us in building a large sales team rapidly was: a) cracking campus hiring, b) figuring out the right
sales compensation plan, and c) having good people managers in our key branches.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

THE MONSTER

As the online jobs market grew in India, it started to attract the attention of large international players. The first to
enter the Indian market were stepstone.com and jobstreet.com in early 2001. Stepstone was the largest recruitment
website in Europe and was dominant in 17 European countries before entering India. It was listed on the London
Stock Exchange, had 25% market share in Europe and had revenues of Rs 230 Crores (US $ 48 mil) in 2001 xxii.
JobStreet was a Malaysian player and was dominant in South-East Asia xxiii.

However, these were eclipsed by the entry of monster.com in the Indian market in March 2001 xxiv. Monster was the
worldwide leader in online job search, was present in 30 countries and was valued at over $7 Billion at the dotcom
peak in 2000xxv.

By August 2002, in one survey estimate, Naukri had 48% market share of the online jobs market, followed by
Jobsahead at 30%, JobStreet at 8% and Monster at 4%xxvi.

Then, to make matters worse for Naukri, The Times of India, India’s leading English newspaper, launched its own job
search portal, timesjobs.com in January 2004xxvii and started promoting it aggressively in its own newspaper, which
had a daily circulation of over 3 million in 2004. xxviii (Exhibit 12). Oberoi commented:

The competitive scenario changed dramatically over that 2–3-year period. The competitive intensity
increased. Ad spends started going up. But, fortunately, the market had a long way to go because we were
just starting. So, the market was under-penetrated. The IT boom was a very big boom at that time. The IT
Service companies were hiring tons of people and they latched onto what Naukri had to offer.

In May 2004, Monster stuck an all-cash dealxxix to acquire 100% of Jobsahead for Rs 40 Crores (US $ 8.4 mil), of which,
Chrys Capital got Rs 30 Crores (US $ 6.3 mil) and the remaining went to the two founders, the 90 employees of the
company and other angel investors.xxx Both the founders were expected to stay with the merged entity for an year
and it was expected that Monster will shut down Jobsahead after integrating it because it made good sense to
promote a single brandxxxi.

Based on Jobsahead’s disclosures, a leading business newspaper in India reported xxxii at the time of the acquisition
that in Financial Year23 2003-04, Jobsahead had brought in revenues of Rs 15 Croresxxxiii (US $ 3.2 mil) with a profit
of Rs 3 Crores (US $ 635k) . This had been strong growth over their revenue of Rs 8 Crores (US $ 1.7 mil) in FY 2002-
03, Rs 5.5 Crores (US $ 1.2 mil) in FY 2001-02, and revenue of Rs 1 Crore (US $ 112,000) in FY 2000-01. In contrast,
Naukri’s operating revenue in FY 2003-04 was Rs 19.2 Crores (US $ 4 mil) with a profit of Rs 2.4 Crores (US $ 508,000).

Puneet Dalmia, co-founder and CEO of Jobsahead said about the acquisition, “Jobsahead has a 40% share of the
online jobs market, while monster.com has another 25%. Together, we will be almost twice as large as the next
player (Naukri). This deal will create a market leader.” xxxiv About operating as a single brand, Puneet said, “In the
long run, it makes sense to promote one brand. For the time being we are trying to see how best to leverage
jobsahead.com's brand equity.”xxxv

Bikhchandani had a different take on the acquisition in an interview with a leading business newspaper:

I suspect Jobsahead was getting squeezed from below by Monster and from above by Naukri and didn't
really have too many options left. I am surprised that 4 years after Jobsahead’s investors put in Rs 25 crore
(US $ 5.3 mil), they sold the company for just Rs 40 crore (US $ 8.5 mil) out of which [investors got] Rs 30

23
“FY” is short for “Financial Year”: April 1st of a calendar year (CY) to March 31st of the next calendar year; this is the time period used by the
Government of India as the Financial Year for taxation and regulatory reporting for all companies.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

crore (US $ 6.4 mil). This gives a return just above 4.5 per cent per annum. That's around the same return
as a fixed deposit in a national bank. Perhaps they had better uses for the money or perhaps they were
expecting even lower returns if they had waited for more time. Naukri is ahead of both Jobsahead and
Monster combined in terms of traffic, daily addition to resume database, client base, response delivered,
rate of technological innovation, sales and servicing ability as defined by number of offices and staff, brand
strength and virtually every other parameter that measures company health in our business. xxxvi

Despite the merger and the entry of various domestic and international players, by 2006, Naukri had 50% market
sharexxxvii of the online job search market, which had grown to 60% by 2009 xxxviii, 70% by 2014xxxix, 80% by 2017xl and
96% by 2020 (Exhibit 4A).

Naukri’s strong sales DNA was an important factor contributing to Naukri winning the race against multiple serious
and well-funded competitors.

INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION

Naukri launched its first and only foray into international markets with Naukrigulf.com in July 2006 to target the job
search market in the Middle East. Oberoi recalled:

Once the Naukri business became self-sustaining and we established clear leadership in the market, we
thought about what we should do next. Should we take Naukri international? Is that the right strategy? Or
should we get into more verticals in India? We toyed with the idea of a business in the Middle East with
Naukri Gulf because a lot of the people in the Gulf were being hired from India; and a lot of HR managers
there were Indians. So, they were happy to get the Naukri database [with resumes from India]. And after
sometime, we also launched a local product.

But after a while we realized that all markets were taken. They already had established players. Monster
was in 30 countries; there were strong players in Europe, South-east Asia and even in the smaller Eastern
European countries. What were left were very small markets in Africa and South Asia. We knew it’s very
hard to displace an incumbent with network effects in this space. So unless you have a very disruptive
model, you can’t be a me too player and hope to displace somebody who has been around for 10 years and
who is a leader in a market. The only way we could have gone international was if we had acquired some
company and that’s not how we wanted to grow.

International requires a very different kind of organization, if you want to succeed. You can’t be sitting in
India and running an international business. You have to have an international mindset if you want to run
an international business. You need to hire high quality local talent, you need to understand the local
consumer, you need to have local marketing, you need to have top management based out of that market…
you need to make a lot of investments if you want to win in the international market. Otherwise, you can
always be a player, but you will not get too far.

We thought we would rather do something new in India where there is not much competition and where
we can build something organically than go into these markets where there is a lot of competition and
where we have nothing really new or different to offer.

NAUKRI’S BLOCKBUSTER IPO

In November 2006, Info Edge became the first Internet company to list on the Indian stock markets 24.

24
Rediff.com and sify.com had gone public earlier but had listed on Nasdaq instead of the Indian stock markets

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Info Edge had a very successful IPO, which was oversubscribed by more than 50 times of the target fund raise. In the
IPO, new shares were issued constituting 19.5% of the company at Rs 320 (US $ 7.02) per share for a total raise of
Rs 170 Crores (US $ 37 mil) xli. The stock opened up at Rs 480 (US $ 10.6) and intra-day high was Rs 623.8, (US $
13.75) , 95% above listing price. The trailing P/E ratio ascribed to the stock was 136.9, which was significantly higher
than the average P/E of 20 of SENSEX at the time. For comparison, the IT Service companies in India were trading at
the time at an average P/E of 24, while Yahoo, Google, and Monster traded at 33, 62 and 27 respectively xlii. Oberoi
explained:

Because there were very few internet companies which were listed, there was a lot of interest in our stock.
We had a lot of analysts covering us. But the Indian stock market at that time was not as large as it is today
in terms of depth and breadth. And the Internet was not understood by investors. So they used to compare
us to IT Service companies. We had to educate the market that we were not an IT Service company; we
were very different.

When ICICI Venture finally divested its stake in 2006, its investment had grown 28.5 times in 6 years xliii.

THE ADVENT OF AI/ML

About going deeper into the recruitment business itself, Goyal believed that with improving Machine Learning (ML)
technologies, in the near future, Naukri would be able to better match a job posting to a candidate and reduce the
recruiter’s work. Better matching would save a recruiter’s time enabling them to place more candidates every
month, which would increase their earning potential and allow Naukri to capture a larger share of the recruitment
spend by HR departments on every successful hire. Goyal also expected ML to become an important moat for Naukri
against advances by LinkedIn and Google because ML needed a lot of data to work well and Naukri had immense
data on candidates in its trove of resumes. Goyal pointed out:

Machine Learning will drive a lot of efficiencies in the recruitment process. If we drive the recruiter
efficiency up, we can capture a larger share of recruitment spending. But our business model will need to
change. Our business model today is very public – we charge for subscription and then we charge for the
number of CV views. All our business is based on the usage of the platform. From here, we will have to
transition to a value-based model. And that will be one of the hardest and most significant transitions that
we will have to do. I tell our recruiter customers, ‘If we will not do it, somebody else will do and it’s not just
us, there are a lot of other players who are trying to nibble at us and come at us from different angles. So,
the writing is there on the wall and I think recruiters will have to adapt to the future.’

Using better AI/ML algorithms was also expected to improve the matching algorithms used by Info Edge’s other
classifieds business units such as Jeevansaathi, an online matrimonial classified, that matched potential grooms with
potential brides.

According to Rohan Mathur, Business Head, Jeevansaathi:

Technology is now enabling computation-heavy algorithms to play a part. You may come to the platform
and specify a list of objective criteria for search like income or socio-economic background. But there are a
lot of other things on your mind, which you find hard to articulate and tell the platform. So, it becomes the
job of the platform to identify, out of the 3000 – 4000 potential matches that fulfil your objective criteria,
which are the top 10 – 20 profiles which will have the highest chances of conversion. To do this, you need
to have the right data to look at. For a new player in the market, it is hard to build this sort of data. When
you don’t have data, it is very hard to build and train ML models to do an effective job of matching profiles,
which gives us an element of competitive advantage.

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The Human mind is also capable of this. It’s just that you can’t do it at scale manually. A lot of the matching
that we do today through ML algorithms was earlier done manually by matchmakers. Now algorithms can
do that and the obvious advantage is scale – you can now do it for a lot of people at a much lower cost.

CONCLUSION

Consolidating his learnings over 20 years of building Info Edge, Oberoi remarked:

The 3 things we’ve understood over time: first is that you need to be in a business where you can have a
moat around your business. Network effects are a very strong moat. Second, timing matters. First mover
can be a big advantage but you cannot be very early; it should not be that by the time the market happens
you are dead and tired. Third, your product offering has to be unique. It has to be something different. You
can’t be a me-too and hope to succeed.

With the entry of Google Jobs and the growth of LinkedIn in India possibly threatening Naukri.com, Oberoi had to
decide the future direction of Naukri. He wondered which strategies were best suited for Naukri to safeguard its
future in the new decade:

a) Naukri should share listings with Google Jobs to monetize them better and to provide more visibility to its
recruiters’ job postings, and find ways to work with LinkedIn in a similar capacity; co-opting instead of competing
with either.
b) The rapid improvement of AI/ML technologies is a great boon for Naukri and Info Edge’s other classifieds
businesses – it must invest aggressively to improve its matching algorithms to create better experiences for
users.
c) Naukri should expand internationally to take its technology and services to other geographies.
d) The stock price is at an all-time high; there is no real cause for concern. Don’t change anything.
e) None of the above. Something else?

Goyal remained unperturbed:

I don’t think this is a winner-take-all market. If you look at US, there are at least two large players, Indeed
and LinkedIn, both of them are growing in high double digits, like 25% per year. So it’s not a winner-take-
all market – two large players continue to grow at a healthy rate. That’s how I believe the Indian market
also will pan out. There will be segments where we will be dominant, there will be niches where they are
dominant. That’s how we will continue to grow.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 1
Slides from Info Edge’s Pitch Deck from Jan 2009

Source: Info Edge’s Pitch Deck from Jan 2009

Exhibit 2
Info Edge’s Share Price

Naukri Share Price Vs Nifty (Scale adjusted)

3500
Naukri on 7 Feb 2020: Rs 3078
72000
3000

62000
2500

52000
2000 Naukri IPO on 21 Nov 2006 at Rs 148
Nifty on 21 Nov 2006: 3918 42000
1500
32000
Nifty on 7 Feb
1000 2020: 12098
22000
500
12000
0
Nov-06 Nov-07 Nov-08 Nov-09 Nov-10 Nov-11 Nov-12 Nov-13 Nov-14 Nov-15 Nov-16 Nov-17 Nov-18 Nov-19
2000

Source: NSE. Adjusted for Stock Bonus / Stock Split

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 FY03-04 FY04-05 FY05-06 FY06-07 FY07-08 FY08-09 FY09-10 FY10-11 FY11-12 FY12-13 FY13-14 FY14-15 FY15-16 FY16-17 FY17-18 FY18-19 FY19-20
Naukri.com
Exhibit 3
Number of resumes on Naukri.com (rounded off to nearest million) 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 46 51 57 63 69
Average number of resumes added daily in '000 10 12 14 11 12 11 12 11 11 12 15 17 15 16
Average number of resumes modified daily in '000 22 36 42 59 72 91 116 131 128 177 235 294 336 425

Number of unique customers 27,500 32,500 34,000 35,500 42,000 46,000 48,000 51,000 57,000 61,000 65,500 76,000 84,645 93,102
% Revenue of Naukri.com from

Source: Collated by the Authors

- IT Services/ ITES 32% 30% 26% 26% 26% 25% 26% 27% 29% 30% 30% N/A 30.80% 30.20%
- BFSI 4 - 5% 4% 5% 5% 5% 5% 5% 5% 5% 5% 5% N/A 5.60% 6.10%
- Infrastructure 20% 21% 22% 22% 22% 21% 20% 18% 17% 15% 14% N/A 13.50% 12.60%
% revenue of Naukri.com from 10% of unique customers 62% 63% 61% 59% 59% 61% 61% 62% 59% 65% 65% N/A N/A N/A

99Acres
Number of listings in '000 (free+paid) 312 482 1083 804 774 1,278 1,906 2,554 3,423 4,135 4,273 4,219 4532 5266
Number of paid listings in '000 13 113 843 687 632 1,060 1,590 2,067 2,464 2,846 2,906 2,687 2972 3355
% Paid to Total Listings 4% 23% 78% 85% 82% 83% 83% 81% 72% 69% 68% 64% 66% 64%

Net Sales in Rs Million 192 441 825 1,395 2,189 2,452 2,322 2,936 3,756 4,349 5,051 6,113 7,176 8,021 9,155 10,983 12,727
Recruitment Solutions 192 437 780 1,277 1,964 2,117 1,954 2,425 3,042 3,368 3,713 4,450 5,290 5,953 6,688 7,858 9,068
Other Verticals 4 45 118 225 335 368 511 714 981 1,338 1,663 1,886 2,068 2,467 3,125 3,659
99Acres 139 133 228 347 516 758 1,004 1,083 1,122 1,354 1,920 2,280
Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Jeevansathi 170 199 221 254 323 360 392 476 580 687 723
1,379
S hiksha + Allcheckdeals + Brijj* 26 36 62 113 142 220 267 327 366 426 482

2024.
Recruitment Revenue per unique customer (Rs) 46,436 60,431 62,265 55,042 57,738 66,130 70,167 72,804 78,070 86,721 90,885 88,000 92,835 97,399
Headcount 1,205 1,656 1,676 1,555 1,901 2,315 2,678 3,168 3,826 4,195 4,012 4,038 4,331 4,698
Annual Revenue per person employed (Rs) 1,157,676 1,321,860 1,463,007 1,493,248 1,544,450 1,622,462 1,623,973 1,594,381 1,597,752 1,710,608 1,999,252 2,267,211 2,535,904 2,709,025
1 USD in INR (As of 31st March in any FY) 43.1650 39.9800 50.6100 44.9550 44.6050 50.8763 54.3041 59.9200 62.2730 66.2555 64.8144 65.0423 69.4431 75.3245
Annual Revenue per person employed (USD) $ 26,820 $ 33,063 $ 28,907 $ 33,217 $ 34,625 $ 31,890 $ 29,905 $ 26,608 $ 25,657 $ 25,818 $ 30,846 $ 34,857 $ 36,518 $ 35,965

Operating EBITDA in Rs Million*** 366 635 652 665 981 1,423 1,474 1,644 1,792 1,355 2,275 2,973 3,413 N/A
Recruitment Solutions 456 815 922 803 1,098 1,550 1,658 1,879 2,279 2,747 3,214 3,759 4,295 N/A
Financial snapshot of Info Edge

Other Verticals (90) (180) (270) (138) (117) (127) (184) (235) (487) (1,392) (939) (786) (882) N/A
99Acres (95) (38) 4 1 (8) (48) (375) (993) (574) (304) (222) N/A
Jeevansathi (47) (1) (41) (49) (75) (67) (44) (140) (64) (235) (338) N/A
S hiksha + Allcheckdeals + Brijj** (128) (99) (80) (79) (101) (120) (68) (259) (301) (247) (322) N/A

*Brijj was a professional social network experiment, like LinkedIn

(Its standalone revenues are not significant)
Sales Data for FY2004 to FY 2006 is from Annual Financials Summary from Info Edge Investor Relations Website
Sales and EBITDA Data for FY2007 and all other metrics for all FY are from Data Sheet from Info Edge Investor Relations Website
Sales and EBITDA Data for FY2008 to FY 2010 is from Annual Report 2011-12
Sales and EBITDA Data for FY2011 to FY 2015 is from Annual Report 2014-15
FY14-15 Headcount and Number of Customers data is from Annual Report 2017-18
Sales and EBITDA Data for FY2016 to FY 2019 is from Annual Report 2018-19
Sales Data for FY2020 is from Audited Financial Statements
***Info Edge is debt-free. Interest costs after EBITDA are negligible.

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 4A
Naukri.com’s market share in the online jobs classifieds market in India

Source: Info Edge Pitch Deck June 2020)

Exhibit 4B
Naukri’s International Businesses Comparables

Source: Info Edge Pitch Deck June 2020

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 5
2019 Revenue of top tech companies in S&P 500

Revenue
No. of Revenue per
Company Employees ($ Bn) Employee
Apple 137,000 260.2 $1.9 Mn
Alphabet 118,899 162.0 $1.4 Mn
Microsoft 144,000 125.8 $ 860k
IBM 352,600 77.1 $220k
Facebook 44,942 70.7 $1.6 Mn
Oracle 136,000 39.5 $290k
Intel 110,800 33.1 $300k
Visa 19,500 23.0 $1.2 Mn
Broadcom 19,000 22.6 $1.2 Mn
Mastercard 11,400 16.9 $1.5 Mn
Cognizant 291,700 16.8 $60k
Cisco 75,900 13.4 $180k
Salesforce 26,244 13.3 $510k
Adobe 22,635 11.2 $490k
Nvidia 13,277 10.9 $820k
LinkedIn 16,000 6.8 $430k
Intuit 7,273 6.8 $930k
AMD 11,400 6.7 $590k
Yahoo! 8,600 5.2 $600k
KLA-Tencor 10,000 4.6 $460k
Qualcomm 37,000 4.4 $120k
Xilinx 4,891 3.1 $630k
Autodesk 10,000 2.6 $260k
PayPal 21,800 2.5 $110k
Lam Research 10,700 2.2 $200k
Applied
Materials 22,000 1.7 $80k
Citrix 8,200 0.7 $90k
Activision
Blizzard 9,200 0.7 $70k

Source: Statistica (Accessed) Sept 2020

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 6
Internet Users as a % of the Population

% of Population that uses the Internet

100%
85.8%
90%
68.9%

80%

70%

60% 43.1%
50.4%
50%

40%

30%
17.5%

20% 6.7%

2.8%
10%
0.5%

0%

India United States World

Source: World Bank

Link: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS
License: CC BY-4.0

Exhibit 7
Naukri website snapshots in Info Edge Pitch Deck from February 2007, 3 months after IPO

Naukri.com Homepage

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 7 (Continued)

Job Search Page

Source: Info Edge Pitch Deck from February 2007

Exhibit 8
Break-up of Naukri’s revenue by service line

Source: Info Edge Pitch Deck February 2020

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 9
Info Edge’s Sales Footprint

Source: Info Edge Pitch Deck from Oct 2010

Exhibit 10
Growth in Sales Force and Footprint of Info Edge over time

Growth in Sales Force Growth in Footprint

3,500 79% 3,098 90% 90
76% 80%
3,000 80
70% 70
2,500
2,600 60% 60
2,000 66%
50% 50
1,500 1,925 40% 40
30% 30
1,000
1,200 20% 20
500 10% 10
0 0% 0
Q4-09
Q2-10
Q4-10
Q2-11
Q4-11
Q2-12
Q4-12
Q2-13
Q4-13
Q2-14
Q4-14
Q2-15
Q4-15
Q2-16
Q4-16
Q2-17
Q4-17
Q2-18
Q4-18
Q2-19
Q4-19

Q4-09
Q2-10
Q4-10
Q2-11
Q4-11
Q2-12
Q4-12
Q2-13
Q4-13
Q2-14
Q4-14
Q2-15
Q4-15
Q2-16
Q4-16
Q2-17
Q4-17
Q2-18
Q4-18
Q2-19
Q4-19
# Sales People Sales Force as a % of Headcount # Branch Offices # Cities

Source: Info Edge Investor Pitch Decks

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

Exhibit 11
Naukri.com’s Virtuous Circle Slide from their first investor pitch deck post-IPO (Feb 2007)

Source: Naukri’s first investor pitch deck post-IPO (Feb 2007)

Exhibit 12
Competition Slide for Naukri (Feb 2007)

Slide on Competition: Naukri

Source: Naukri’s first investor pitch deck post-IPO (Feb 2007)

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 Naukri.Com (A): The Business of Internet in India

ENDNOTES
i
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/linkedin-sees-20-times-growth-in-10-years-in-india-11575451367145.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
ii
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/jobs/google-launches-job-search-in-india/articleshow/63898316.cms?from=mdr (Accessed Sept 2021)
iii
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish, Rashmi Bansal
iv
http://swaminomics.org/indias-great-escape-from-the-socialist-zoo/#comments (Accessed Sept 2021)
v
Ibid. (iii)
vi
https://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/special/dotcoms-poster-boy--Bikhchandani-bikhchandani/story/1174.html (Jan 2008) (Accessed
Sept 2021)
vii
Entrepreneurship, Chapter 4: Creativity and the Business Idea; Robert D. Hisrich et al. Mc Graw Hill Education. ISBN-10: 1-25-900-163-6
viii
Ibid. (iii)
ix
https://dropoutdudes.com/naukri-founder-Bikhchandani-success-story/ (Accessed Sept 2021)
x
Ibid. (iii)
xi
Ibid. (vi)
xii
Ibid. (iii)
xiii
Ibid. (vii)
xiv
Ibid. (iii)
xv
https://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/making-money-on-the-job-104052901004_1.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xvi
Ibid. (vii)
xvii
Ibid. (vi)
xviii
https://www.rediff.com/money/2005/dec/14spec1.htm (Accessed Sept 2021)
xix
http://www.pressreference.com/Gu-Ku/India.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xx
https://www.bookmyforex.com/blog/1-usd-to-inr-in-1947-2019/ (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxi
Ibid. (xvi)
xxii
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/step-stone-to-success/articleshow/17772718.cms?from=mdr (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxiii
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/JobStreet-India-targets-15mn-revenue-by-2002/articleshow/2098356256.cms (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxiv
https://www.businesswireindia.com/monster-india-launches-a-brand-new-site-with-local-technology-9124.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxv
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/08/randstad-buys-monster-for-429m-as-recruitment-consolidation-continues/ (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxvi
https://www.financialexpress.com/archive/online-job-exchanges-bullish-on-www-project-rush-on-e-route/55714/ (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxvii
http://www.tbsl.in/?page_id=789 (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxviii
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/175-years-TOIs-growth-story/toi175yrsarticleshow/25750780.cms (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxix
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/monster-acquires-jobsahead-104052601101_1.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxx
https://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Monster-snaps-up-Jobsahead-nid-24324-cid-3.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxxi
Ibid. (xvi)
xxxii
https://www.rediff.com/money/2002/may/23portal.htm (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxxiii
https://www.financialexpress.com/archive/monster-buys-jobsahead-for-rs-40-cr/120295/ (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxxiv
Ibid. (xvi)
xxxv
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/monster-acquires-jobsahead-104052601101_1.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xxxvi
Ibid. (xvi)
xxxvii
Naukri’s Corporate Presentation: Feb 2007
xxxviii
Naukri’s Earnings call transcript: July 23, 2009
xxxix
Naukri’s Corporate Presentation: Dec 2015
xl
Naukri’s Corporate Presentation: Feb 2019
xli
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/info-edge-ipo-sold-50-times-106110301095_1.html (Accessed Sept 2021)
xlii
https://www.financialexpress.com/archive/info-edge-ipo-lists-at-hefty-9493-premium/184612/ (Accessed Sept 2021)
xliii
Ibid. (vi)

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This document is authorized for use only in Sridhar Sethuram Iyer's Monsoon 2023 - Demystifying Investments: Private Equity and Venture Capital at Ashoka University from Sep 2023 to Mar
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