Rediff.com India Limited (REDF) F1Q13 Earnings Call July 26, 2012 9:00 am ET Executives Mandar Narvekar – Investor Relations and Corporate Affairs Ajit Balakrishnan – Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Swasti Bhowmick – Chief Financial Officer Presentation Operator Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Sourodip Sarkarm, the moderator of this call. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Rediff.com Conference Call. For the duration of the presentation, all participants’ line will be in listen-only mode. And we will have a Q&A session after the presentation. I would like to now hand over conference to Mr. Mandar Narvekar. Over to you, sir. Mandar Narvekar Thank you, Sourodip. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being with us to discuss Rediff.com’s financial results for the first quarter ended June 30, 2012. I would like to introduce you to the members of the management present on this call, who will take you through the highlights of the company’s performance. We have with us Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan, Chairman and CEO; and Mr. Swasti Bhowmick, CFO. As mentioned earlier, all of you are currently on a listen-in mode only. This conference will last for about 20 minutes and then we will be glad to answer any questions that you may have. For your immediate reference, we have also posted the earnings release for the first fiscal quarter year ended June 30, 2012, dated today on our website at investor.rediff.com. You may also call me at our Indian office at 9122-61820000, and we will be glad to fax or email you a copy during the course of this call.
Before proceeding, I would like to mention that during the conference call except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements may constitute forward-looking statements for the purpose of the safe harbor provision under the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as may, will, expect, believe, will continue, anticipate, estimate, intent, plan, contemplate, seek to, future, objective, goal, project, should, will perceive or similar terms, variations of those terms or the negatives of those terms.
These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from those that may be projected by the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to a slowdown in the economy worldwide and in the sectors in which our clients are based, a slowdown in the Internet and IT sectors worldwide, competition, the success or failure of our past or future acquisitions, attracting, recruiting and retaining highly-skilled employees, technology, acceptance of new products or services, the development of broadband Internet and 3G networks in India, legal and regulatory policies, managing risks associated with the customer products and a widespread acceptance on the Internet. Listeners should carefully review the risk factors and any other cautionary statements contained in our latest annual report on Form 20-F and other reports filed by Rediff.com with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. These reports are available on the SEC website from the SEC offices in Washington DC and on request by emailing us at investor@rediff.co.in. Rediff.com and its subsidiaries may from time to time make additional written and oral forward-looking statements. Rediff.com and its subsidiaries do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by Rediff.com or on its behalf.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. Read the rest of this transcript for free on seekingalpha.com