Covid-19 crisis: Strategy change spurred business revival, says InMobi

However, the home-grown mobile marketing and advertising software firm will have to wait for at least six months to achieve $1 billion in revenue, said Founder and CEO Naveen Tewari

InMobi has managed to weather the Covid-19 storm with a change in approach, thereby enabling revenues to touch pre-Covid levels.

However, the home-grown mobile marketing and advertising software firm will have to wait for at least six months to achieve $1 billion in revenue — a target it had set for the ongoing calendar year, said Founder and CEO Naveen Tewari.

Once the pandemic unfolded, the company realised the future would be a lot more digital and therefore, changed tack, said Tewari. For its main marketing Cloud business, the firm was traditionally catering to brands in segments such as consumer packaged goods, travel, and entertainment — which were quite under-served. 

“But as soon as the pandemic hit, we did all the retooling required and created solutions that are more amenable to the post-Covid world,” said Tewari. “Therefore, we invested more in categories like gaming, entertainment, and tele-health. This helped us replace dollars coming in from old areas with those coming in from newer ones, helping us reach the pre-Covid level by the end of the quarter.” 

Unlike other technology start-ups, InMobi is heavily dependent on the US market, which accounts for 60 per cent of its business, while China contributes 20 per cent.

In fact, the firm — among India’s earliest unicorns — has 150 direct employees in China, most of whom are locals. For its TruFactor unit, which focuses on providing business intelligence to global industries, Tewari said the April-June period was among the best quarters because “we realised people need more intelligence than earlier, with the worldview changing during Covid”.

The TruFactor business was set up last year, banking on the acquisition of Pinsight Media. The latter is a mobile data analytics and advertising unit that SoftBank-backed InMobi acquired from US telecom giant Sprint Corp in October 2018.

However, InMobi got its biggest boost from social platforms Glance (a mobile lock-screen software), and Roposo (short video-sharing app), with the latter rising to the top, following India’s ban on 59 Chinese apps. InMobi acquired Roposo in December last year and started scaling up the business from April after integrating the business with itself. Seen as a made-in-India replacement for TikTok, the video-sharing app added about 700,000 users an hour soon after the ban on Chinese apps, on June 30.