Register a domain name, create content, advertise heavily and get traffic to the portals going. Don't worry about the revenue models or even losses. That was the thinking of most dotcom promoters back in 2000. Take Home Trade, for example. The company signed on Hrithik Roshan, Shah Rukh Khan and Sachin Tendulkar as brand ambassadors and launched with a Rs 65-crore ad blitzkrieg. Or indya.com, which took out a fullpage advertisement on the front page of a leading newspaper for an astronomical sum.
Domain name registration became a big business as dotcoms of all hues mushroomed. By March 2000, thanks in part to six consecutive rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve since 1999, the dotcom bubble burst in the US. A few months later, the mayhem began in India. Dotcoms like go41.com, ideasnyou. com, hometrade.com, skumars.com, indya.com, arzoo.com, jaldi.com and purpleyogi.com went belly up. Companies laid off workers in droves. The promoters of indya.com sold their stake to Rupert Murdoch for over $50 million in mid-2001.
The Y2K Bug FixIt was a bomb that never went off. Mainframes would shut down and your personal computer would conk out at the crack of dawn on January 1, 2000, because of the Y2K or millennium bug. So went the scare. In the early days of the computer, programmers had coded years using just the last two digits to save space, and bits of these codes had passed into later programming. So, the argument went, when computer clocks entered the year 2000, the machines would read it as 00 and even interpret it as 1900. Thousands of Indian programmers went abroad to fix the bug. On Y2K-day, nothing happened and some called it the "hoax of the century".
Tata's Tetley BuyoutIt was India's first leveraged buyout. Tetley, the British company that had invented the tea bag, was twice as big as Tata Tea. But that did not stop Tata Tea from making what was then the largest cross-border acquisition by an Indian company in February 2000. The cost: 271 million ($431 million).
Did you know?Taking a leaf out of China's book, India introduced its maiden Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policy in March 2000. Today, 579 SEZs have been approved, but only 122 are operational
Quote of the year
It is a bold move and I hope that other Indian corporates will follow.
Ratan Tata, on the leveraged buyout of Tetley by Tata Tea |
