Just Dial the Market? Not Yet

The tele-yellow pages company that started with two landlines and 50,000 has postponed its IPO. But it's going strong and plans to deliver not just information but services     VSS Mani, founder and CEO of Just Dial, says he's happy that the company's planned IPO has been postponed to next year. "It was the easiest call to take," says Mani. "The point is we wanted the IPO to be a big event, given that there's a huge appetite for Just Dial stock," he adds. And why couldn't that 'event' happen now? A sleepy capital market, the rupee which seems to have stepped on a banana peel has made foreign investors skittish about the timing of the IPO. Instead, Just Dial has raised yet another round of funding of about 327 crore from existing investors like Sequoia Capital and SAP Ventures. Sequoia pooled in the lion's share of this round ( 305 crore) — making Just Dial the fund's largest investment in an Indian company so far.  "When Just Dial lists, it will be the largest public issue by an Indian company in the consumer internet space," says the PE practice head of a leading accounting firm, who is not allowed to comment on individual companies.  Dial for Help  Just Dial, like the name suggests, wasn't always an internet company. If it had been started as one, it would have been called Just Dial-up. Internet services began in India in 1995, just a year before Just Dial was founded as a sort of tele-yellow pages. Indian telecom was still in its infancy.      Back then, if you wanted to find out what's the telephone number or address of the nearest beauty parlour or a gym, you called Just Dial and the operator would dictate the details which you scribbled down on a notepad.      That model changed in 2004, recalls Mani. By then, there were over 40 million mobile subscribers in India. So, Just Dial began SMS-ing and emailing details to customers.      Strictly speaking, Just Dial became an "internet company" only in 2007. The company had launched a website in 2000, at the height of the dotcom boom, but did not throw its weight behind it as traffic was low, given poor internet penetration. But, by 2007, India had 46 million Net users and 165 million mobile subscribers — most of whom were in urban India, the biggest market for Just Dial.  Spreading the Net  That prompted Just Dial to start two services in 2007: its first serious effort at routing queries through its website (www.justdial.com) and two, its mobile internet and SMS-based search services. Since then, the company has piggybacked on the explosive growth of mobile and internet subscribers to add to customer numbers.      "When we launched in 2007, we had 60,000 users a day. Now, we have a million-plus. Over 60% of our queries come from our website," says Mani. Today, Just Dial has a database of over 7 million listings (as of March 2012) and over a crore user reviews and ratings of products and services from Palakkad to Patna. Mani sees the next wave of traffic coming from folks accessing the website through their mobiles. "A year ago, only 2% of our queries came from people accessing the site through their mobile. Today, thanks to 3G and mobile device penetration, that number is almost 10%," says Mani.      Just Dial is also sitting on a wealth of data, thanks to the myriad nature of queries from users. For example, he says that the company witnessed sales graphs of Samsung and Nokia crisscross in the past few years, as sales of Samsung phones took off. He doesn't plan to commercialise such data, yet.  Different Caller Tune  However, in the future, and Mani won't stick a timeline on it or get into finer details, Just Dial plans to get into the transactions space. Basically, a user will not just call Just Dial to find out the address of the nearest pizza outlet or the grocery store but will actually place an order through Just Dial. Just Dial won't sell the pizza or sugar but will act as the enabler of the transaction. "In the gold rush, the guys who made money were the enablers...the ones who sold shovels," says Mani. That transition to transactions, if it succeeds, is probably the next step of Just Dial's evolution as a true blue internet firm.      For a firm that started with a couple of landline connections and 50,000 in the kitty, Just Dial has come a long way.