Bazee.com to break even this financial year

Online auction portal, Baazee.com expects to break-even in the current financial year. The site, that was partly promoted by media group Star and ICICI Bank, has been reporting loss since its inception in 2000. The online auction today has expanded the number of product categories to 1,500 from five when it started.

Addressing the Chennai media, Suvir Sujan, co-CEO, Baazee.com India Pvt Ltd said, "Today we are also handling auctioning of re-possessed cars and two-wheelers for many banks in the country. In the last one year we have also added business procurement services that predominantly covers non-core items."

Sujan estimated the total business on the site to be Rs 100 crore in the last fiscal and expected to double it in the current financial year.

"This is the volume of business transacted on the website. Our topline, which comes as a commission on each transaction could be between Rs 5-10 crore," he said.

Baazee.com had raised $20 million as seed capital from venture capitalists and individual investors at the time of inception.

"As of date we have spent close to $10 million. We should be breaking even this year. Profit should start flowing in without any major incremental investments from now on," he said.

Sujan added that an estimated 45 per cent of the business comes from B and C towns, which was something the website managers did not expect at the formative stages.

Baazee.com has recently tied up with Yahoo! and MSN for ad-exchange programmes and is in talks with Rediff.com for a similar arrangement.