Quikr originally started as Kijiji India in 2008 and later re-branded itself. The company features classified ads for everything from used goods to jobs. After mopping up $90 million in private equity funding from a bunch of investors led by Swedish firm AB Kinnevik, it has joined the likes of Flipkart, Jabong, Myntra and Snapdeal to become one of India’s most sought-after e-commerce companies.
With this, the company has so far raised about $140 million from investors, including Warburg Pincus, eBay, Omidyar Network, Matrix Partners India, Nokia Growth Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.
Quikr founder and Chief Executive Officer Pranay Chulet, 40, spoke to
The online classifieds market is very different from the e-tailing industry. Quikr puts the buyer and seller in touch, and lets them continue their transaction offline. This makes it different from e-commerce sites such as Amazon or Flipkart, where the transaction is routed through the site, which then claims a portion of the revenue as a commission.
The business is growing fast but should be built in the right way so that quality is not affected in the process of attracting more users, page views or traffic. We, at Quikr, are not targeting only listings or page views but also consumer engagement, traffic and the monetisation matrix.
How are you planning to utilise the funds that have been raised?
This year, we will invest more in product development (a better consumer-facing app across all mobile platforms), talent, marketing and advertising.
We intend to double our headcount from 150 currently besides expanding our outsourced vendor base.
We will be adding features such as a missed-call facility. We have almost 12-14 million listings and will focus on improving the quality of products that are listed on the site. We also plan to expand into small towns.
You said that the classified segment is a high-margin business. Can you explain that in detail and what is your target?
Profit margins in these kinds of businesses are as high as 70-80 per cent and we have not reached there but will soon achieve that. We are a privately held company and hence can’t talk about any numbers here.
All I can say is that we started monetising Quikr two-and-a-half years ago and in the last one year, we have grown several times bigger. However, we are not looking at over-monetising it.
What do you mean by that? What are your revenue models?
This means we don’t want to flood our site with advertisements. This is not our focus. Revenues from advertising are about 5-10 per cent and we want to keep it at that.
In the last 3-4 years, we have doubled traffic, tripled our consumer engagement and grown five times in terms of revenues. We cannot be the champion by just getting more page views.
We have three revenue streams — premium listings, leads generation and advertising — that contribute to estimated revenues of ₹200 crore.
You are quite big on the used goods market. Does the fund-raising mean that the market for used goods is growing fast?
As mobile and Internet penetration increases, e-commerce and the classified market will also grow.
We do focus on the used goods or second-hand goods market but that is not a high-margin business. About 70-80 per cent of our revenues comes from jobs, real estate and cars.
Now that you have raised $140 million in total, do we see an IPO soon? Will you also look at exiting the business?
We want to keep our heads down and focus on growing the company. I don’t intend to sell it. We are at the cusp of a revolution in the classified market and we don’t want to get carried away.