Rediff.com's CEO Discusses F1Q13 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

I would now like to introduce Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan, our Chairman and CEO.

Ajit Balakrishnan



Good morning to everyone. It’s a pleasure to have you on the call and we appreciate your continued interest in our company. In the fiscal year first quarter 2012, India online advertising business was adversely affected because of continued weakness in the banking, financial services, insurance and consumer electronic segments, while we saw good traction in our online shopping segment with increased transaction volumes and improved margins. The interplay of these trends, and the effect of spending rupee vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar is reflected in our results, which show a decline compared to previous fiscal periods.

We like most others in the Indian online industry continued to feel the impact of the uncertainty in the global economy and spending in India continues to be tight particularly in the advertising market. 3G adoption has been slower to materialize than we expected, but there continues to be strong initiatives from operators and carriers to promote data driven mobile devices and services and to enhance India's broadband infrastructure investments in India's fibre-optic networks in particular are intensifying, and we're witnessing most evolve towards 4G services and long-term evolution technology. Many industries forecast over the several years remain bullish in India despite some of the near-term challenges we’re facing.

Onto our results and business overview, advertisers in India specifically in the banking, financial services, insurance, media and consumer electronics categories are facing challenging times and they’ve cut down their overall advertising spent. This has negatively impacted India advertising revenues, which declined in the 2012 first fiscal quarter by 28% on a quarter-on-quarter basis in dollar terms.

In addition to the lower spending by online advertisers, reduction in the value of the Rupee against the U.S dollar has resulted in a sudden decline in the Indian advertising revenues by 6%. So Sri will provide more information on this later.

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