Durba Ghosh Moneycontrol News
Global web-hosting and cloud company GoDaddy, which crossed 1-million user mark in India, is betting on the untapped market of small and medium businesses in tier 2 and 3 towns to drive the company's next level of growth.
“Currently, only about 20% of the total 51 million SMEs in India are IT-enabled. We have barely scratched the surface. We expect at least one-third of the remaining SMEs to come online in next five years and we want to play a major part in it,” said Nikhil Arora, GoDaddy India’s Vice President and Managing Director.
The company claimed that about 50% of all new businesses on-boarded by GoDaddy today comes from tier 2 and 3 towns such as Rohtak, Sonipat, Meerut, Jaipur, Patna, and Ludhiana among others.
GoDaddy had launched its product in several Indian languages besides English, such as Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, in 2016, which is also the year when it gained leadership in .IN domain registrations.
GoDaddy now offers the product in 7 different Indian languages, which is expected to further help the company make inroads beyond metropolitan cities. According to Arora, 9 out of 10 future internet users in India will be from non English-speaking belt.
“Our focus this year will be to provide flexible product plans for every stage of businesses. Basically, we want to go deeper into personalisation. We will also adopt a flexible pricing because we believe that is fit for SMEs,” Arora added.
GoDaddy entered the Indian market in 2012, with less than 40% brand presence, has now managed to double it to 80%. But the company will have to battle biggies such as Google to make a mark in its next stage of growth.
Last year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a series of new initiatives to attract India's 51 million small and medium businesses on its cloud platform. The new initiatives include tools to build websites, a training program and support service to help the businesses get online.
The company also launched a Cloud region in Mumbai that uses Google's core infrastructure, data analytics and machine learning to offer several services including compute, big data, storage, and networking.
Over 8 million Indian SMEs are already using Google's platforms, in contrast to GoDaddy’s 1 million. GoDaddy delivers integrated suite of cloud-based online products to help small businesses leverage the power of Internet, from domain name registration to website creation to business email and productivity tools, designed to create and manage online presence.
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