Confirming it, Fabmart's managing director VS Sudhakar says: ``The money will help to support the various expansion work and market building exercise.'' However, the company has not involved any third party valuation in the process. The funds are expected to roll in the next six months, adds Sudhakar. Fabmart started with an initial capital base of Rs 5.5 crore.

Headquartered in Bangalore, fabmart.com was unveiled in September 1999 as a multi-store virtual supermarket. It began with a music store with a collection of 5,000 music titles. As part of the expansion plan, the company is now working on opening a Web bookstore in January and a garments and computers cyberstore by March 2000. According to Sudhakar: ``We arelooking at some strategic investment coming in. We have a few options which we are considering.''

Fabmart's gameplan seems clear: The partner/partners have to bring in new elements of selling and technical expertise. They should give direction to the cyberstores and support it with strategic values. The stake could be a minority/majority one. Says Sudhakar: ``We are not in the business of minority or majority stake but are in the process of building a corporation. We are looking at broadbased wealth creation model with an equally balanced team in the process.''

As part of a market building exercise, the company has already allocated between Rs 3-4 crore for advertising in the next one year. Last month, it released a corporate campaign in all national dailies. With the release of the cyber bookstore in January, it has plans to release a sequel to the corporate campaign. For the purpose of campaigns, Bangalore-based Pentagon has been appointed as the advertising agency.

Fabmart is also looking at onlineadvertising in a major way. Already, it has released banners in hotmail and mid-day.com to popularise its musicstore. Under offline advertising, it is looking at hoardings (Pune and Coimbatore to start with) and cybercafes (Bangalore and Calcutta to begin with).

To attract traffic to its site, Fabmart recently announced a millennium bonanza for visitors. With the scheme on till January 20, 2000, visitors of the site are entitled to three cassettes for the price of just one. Sudhakar says: ``As a result, we have got about 1,200 orders for this specific scheme in the last one month alone. Otherwise, on an average, we receive 90-100 orders per day.''

Fabmart recently joined hands with Remo Fernandes to create music history in cyberspace. Remo's latest song ``Cyber Viber'' has been composed exclusively for the Internet and will be available for free download on fabmart.com. According to Fabmart's vice-president K Vaitheeswaran: ``This is going to revolutionise music buying. More importantly, the idea is tomake people experiment with online buying.''