Kerala - Kozhikode   

Keep pace with trends, IIM students told

Staff Reporter

IT management seminar begins at IIM-K

KOZHIKODE: Ajit Balakrishnan, founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rediff.com, has exhorted young students of Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K), to watch the trends that unfold in the country's economic scenario, if they wished to become entrepreneurs.

Presenting a paper `The Entrepreneurial Challenge' at the two-day Annual IT Management Seminar (AIMS), 2005, which began on the IIM-K campus on Saturday, Mr. Balakrishnan said that now-a-days companies were shifting their business to Internet.

None of the top 10 companies listed on the Mumbai Stock Exchange (MSE) in 2005 would remain in those positions in 2030, he said. Only three or four companies that were among the top 10 companies in the 1970's existed and they are nowhere in the list of top 10 companies.

Rediff's route

Outlining the `tortuous route' that Rediff.com had to chart prior to and after the collapse of e-business, Mr.Balakrishnan showed the boom of Internet companies on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, New York, with a graph that outlined stocks of the company Yahoo increasing by 3000 per cent from January 1998 to January 2000. But the world of e-business collapsed within two years.

Commenting on the difficult initial period, Mr. Balakrishnan said that out of the 303 IT companies that went public in June 2000 on NASDAQ Stock Exchange, only Rediff remained on the exchange list even after the collapse in 2002.

The concept of Internet portal was difficult to be acknowledged initially in the country. But then industrial revolution also took many years to be acknowledged. The company also waited for Indian telecom de-regulation process to unfold itself.

Mr. Balakrishnan said that infrastructure was not very important for an entrepreneur. But the entrepreneur is an innovator who will have to `plough a lonely furrow,' he said.

Participating in the interactive session, Mr. Balakrishnan said that `angel investors' (angel investors are affluent individuals who provide capital for business start-ups usually in exchange for an equity stake) are persons who will help out in implementing the ideas of those innovators who lack funds. ``However, `angel investors' are absent in a non-entrepreneur State like Kerala. Slowly, some of these investors are emerging in Mumbai and Bangalore,'' he said.

Genuine investors

He said that genuine investors would look for the idea and also whether the person putting forth the idea has the ability to implement it.

Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer, Wipro Technologies, and Sriniketh Raman Chakravarthi, senior manager, corporate development, Cognizant, K. Ganesh, non-executive chairman, Marketics, K.P.M. Das, vice-president, Mobile Computing Products Group, Encore Technologies and Anjali Mandal, executive vice-president, financial services division, Headstrong India were among the other speakers at the seminar.

Krishna Kumar, director, IIM-K inaugurated the seminar.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Rare stamps on display at `Philafest 05'
Keep pace with trends, IIM students told
PCB order victory for people: Medha
EDUSAT facility to be extended to 13 schools in Balussery
Supplyco affairs: PUCL seeks CBI probe
Minister promises help for tourism in North Kerala

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu