Weekly Tech News Round-Up from India

05:29 | Kamla Bhatt | Nov 1st, 2006 9:05pm |

That familiar term IPO is making a comeback in India. Info Edge India Pvt Ltd opened its Initial Public Offering for subscription from today through November 2, 2006. Info Edge owns properties like Naukri.com, a job search portal; JeevanSaathi.com, a matchmaking portal and 99acres.com, a real estate portal. The Financial Express writes that this is the first time an Indian internet company is going IPO after 2000. The company plans to raise over $35 million from its IPO. Info Edge recently got a round of investments from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures.

We now move to the mobile market in India. India has one of the hottest and fastest growing mobile markets in the world.

Indian mobile company Idea Cellular got a fresh round of investments from four private equity firms. The Times of India writes Idea Cellular will receive about $550 million from a group of investors that includes Providence Equity Partners, ChrysCapital, Citigroup and TA Associates. Providence Equity Partners has acquired a 15 percent stake in the telecom company reports The Business Standard. ChrysCapital has acquired 4% of the company according to the The Times of India. Through this investment the majority holder Aditya Birla group’s stake will be diluted from to 98.3 to 73 percent.

Idea Cellular announced the appointment of Mr. Sanjeev Aga as the new managing director of the company.

Bharti Airtel announced its second quarter (July-September) earnings and said that its net profit rose 79 percent for the quarter from a year ago. The net income for the July-September quarter was $203 million and the company has added 4 million new customers during this period. Bharti is India’s largest mobile phone service provider.

Cell phones continue to show a strong growth in the Indian market. Financial Express reports that Nokia sold 400,000 mobile handsets on October 19th, the eve of Diwali, a major Indian festival. This is the first time that such a large number of phones were sold on a single day in India reports the paper.

Earlier this month Nokia opened its first concept store in Jaipur, Rajasthan. This state of the art store has ‘Experience Zone’ and a ‘Nokia Lounge’ that is designed to provide customers with a complete mobility experience. This is Nokia’s third concept store in India. The other two stores are located in New Delhi and Bangalore.

Merger and Investment News:

Wipro, India’s third largest IT services company recently acquired two Singapore-based companies. Wipro Infotech, the India, Middle East and Asia Pacific IT Business Unit of Wipro Ltd (NYSE:WIT), announced it has signed an agreement to acquire India, Middle East and SAARC operations of 3D Networks and Planet PSG in an all cash deal. Wipro will pay about $23 million to acquire both these companies.

Yahoo India recently announced that it is launching the Yahoo! beta mail service in the country. The company also introduced Yahoo Indichat plugs-in for its Tamil and Hindi users. The Plugin works on Version 8 of Yahoo! India Messenger and is a Side Panel Plugin. Currently, it allows the users to chat in Hindi and Tamil using an English keyboard. Users can download Indichat plug-in for Hindi and Tamil into their Yahoo! Messenger 8.0.

Finally, here is a way for start-up entrepreneurs to get into the radar of Venture Capitalists. This announcement comes from the recently concluded TiECon New Delhi where Vivek Ranadive of Tibco was the keynote speaker.

TiE New Delhi and Canaan Partners announced an an entrepreneurial challenge for new and pre-existing start-ups. According to Alok Mittal of Canaan Partners, the winner of the challenge will get an automatic sponsorship into the band of angels in New Delhi and also be hosted by Prof. Phil Anderson at the INSEAD campus in Singapore. For details about the entrepreneurial challenge visit the http://www.tienewdelhi.org/mentoring.htm TiE or the Canaan Partners websites.

Click here for transcript.

Tags: Naukri.com, Wipro, Yahoo! India, TiECon

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 9:05 pm and is filed under PodTech, Enterprise 2.0, India, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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