Under the new marketing thrust, the company will focus on building relationships with cybercafes. For this, the company has already roped in 300 cafes in five cities and also organising promotional events. The portal's recently launched B2B initiative, called Xavient Technologies, is also expected to be fully operational in a month. Says Mr Vikram Chopra, managing director, eIndia.com (Indian Operations): "Eindia will forge relationships with global B2B organisations and help companies in areas like creating exchanges and supply chain integration." For Xavient Technologies, eIndia is getting personnel from the field of management consultancy, advertising industry and high-end technology. The B2B thrust will also boost eIndia's software consultancy business.

"The projects derived at Xavient can be downloaded and integrated with the software consultancy division," says Mr Chopra. E-India is expecting revenues of $4-$5 million in the first year from software consultancy. "We expect software consultancy revenues to more than double in the second year," says Mr Chopra. Eindia is also planning to go public during January-March 2001. "We've raised a good amount of money in the US and would have invested not more than 20 per cent of overall VC investments," says Mr Chopra.

The company raised $3 million in the first phase of funding in August 1999. In the second round, the company garnered $25 million in April 2000 from Alta, ICICI, TCW, and China.com among others. EIndia Inc is expecting revenues of $1 million a month in the next six months, up from around half a million a month at present. Says Mr Chopra, "The B2C operations should break-even in the first quarter of the next calendar year." In the area of content development - over 70 per cent of the content is generated in-house - eIndia is contemplating alliances in the field of education (it has six content alliances now). Says Mr Chopra, "we are also looking at alliances with some regional ISPs and one national ISP." While eIndia broadens its focus to encompass B2B operations, the company will concentrate on air-tickets and concerts to drive revenues.

The company will organise around eight Bollywood-style events a year in the US, with each event generating $200,000 to $300,000. eIndia is already an online ticket sales company in the US and has organised three Bollywood events since April 2000. To promote eIndia services, the company will also work closely with passengers travelling from the US to India. Since the company has stake in North America's biggest consolidator, it provides cheap airline tickets from US to India for $899). The company has access to key database of people with high disposable income.

Eindia is also planning to expand fulfillment infrastructure - at present it has nine affiliates (including Shopper's Stop) and over 1,000 products - to address the needs of US-based NRIs, who would like to send gifts to their Indian relatives and friends. EIndia claims to have 10 million page views a month, a registered user base of two lakh. the company claims that 40 per cent of traffic to the site originates in the US.