Netcore Acquires Greynium – Bullish On Local Languages
Our recent WATShow with Abhijit Saxena Of NetCore Solutions had questioned the importance of vernacular content to his business (check his answer here) and now it seems Netcore has gone ahead and acquired Greynium which owns Indian language portals in oneIndia.in. The acquisition would have been helped by the fact that the NetCore’s founder and Managing Director, Rajesh Jain, had earlier invested in Greynium through his personal venture capital fund, Emergic Venture Capital.
Besides for OneIndia.in greynium also owns an online Indian classifieds portal Click.in which competes with the likes of quikr and clickindia in the Indian classifieds space.
NetCore is well known for its email and SMS solutions (via Mytoday brand) which is being used by over 2,000 companies. In 2008 it launched its own mobile news site in nayanaya.mobi and then was also in the news for its BJP support and sms blast.
How will the synergy Pan out for Netcore?
Netcore which was primarily a mobile player will not be a online and mobile player with some serious regional reach and firepower as well. Abhijit Saxena CEO of Netcore states that ‘this will be a strategic acquisitionwhich will position NetCore across Internet and mobile space and bring revenue from ads, lead generation, content subscriptions and commerce’.
One India has a reach of 6+ million monthly unique visitors (claimed by them) on its portals in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Add this to the 4 million sms reach that Netcore has through MyToday and you get a non unique reach of 10 million people.
Rajesh Jain, founder and Managing Director of NetCore and previous investor in Greynium predicted that the future of the Internet in India will be a multi-screen one and hence he feels that the combination of MyToday’s mobile services and OneIndia’s Internet portals will work for them.
Our Take
This should be an interesting foray to follow. As earlier portals like Rediff had tried this by investing in a company like Vakow which later didn’t work out. It also probably points towards the fact that an only mobile play and monetization is finding it tough to grow and scale on its own and may require web integration to attract advertisers with a full suite of digital solutions.
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