Giving the booming Indian online market its due, world’s largest search engine company Google Inc commenced its operations in the country by setting up two sales and marketing offices to primarily increase its advertising revenue by leveraging on local presence.
At a press briefing in Mumbai, Google extended its operations here by announcing the setting-up of dedicated sales and marketing offices in Delhi and Mumbai.
These operations complement existing centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad and are designed to enable Google to develop business opportunities, provide locally relevant products and services, and deliver advertising services to its users, advertisers and partners throughout India, Mr Ashish Kashyap, Country Manager, India Sales and Operations, Google Online India, said at a conference here.
Market in the country is changing rapidly. Infrastructure here is expanding at a fast pace, which is resulting into more people coming online, Google vice president (Asia Pacific and Latin America) Sukhinder Singh Cassidy said.
The Google India team would forge relationships with businesses, partners and agencies throughout the region and enable them to take advantage of this growth in e-Commerce, said Cassidy.
Google’s advertisers in India currently include Citibank, Monster India, Bharatmatrimony.com, MakeMyTrip, SpiceJet, Kingfisher Airlines, ICICI Bank, Shaadi.com, Ebay India, and Birla Sunlife.
The company, however, declined to divulge the current ad revenues from India and also did not comment on projections.
Commenting on Google’s global advertising program, Google AdWords, that enables advertisers and businesses of all sizes and industries to reach out to people who are interested in their products and/or services over the Internet, Kashyap said that AdWords matches text-based advertisements to users’ search queries providing them with relevant information, and returning significant results to advertisers/businesses. Google AdWords promises to be an automated, low-cost, online sign-up process allowing advertisers to implement ad-campaigns efficiently.
The company has appointed Mr. Kashyap as its sales and operations manager for the country said, "We see an opportunity in India for Google to partner with businesses – through Google AdWords – to make an impact on their growth."
Kashyap, who has extensive experience in this business, has earlier worked with Indiatimes.com as general manager and business head of its E-Commerce services.
Though small in absolute amount so far, our ad revenue from India is growing at a rapid pace. This initiative is aimed at giving a further push to this, says Kashyap. He refused to share any financial figures or exact growth numbers. Google has opened offices in Delhi and Mumbai.
Asked about the concerns voiced by President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on Google Earth’s free-mapping program available on the Net — which includes high-resolution images of sensitive locations such as the Army headquarters, Parliament House, Rashtrapati Bhavan and Defence establishments — Ms Cassidy said, "We are sensitive to local laws. We are as sensitive to mapping concerns as copyright. We are currently in the process of working through local issues."
The map of Google Earth allows everybody to search terabytes of geographical data across the world.
"Google is open to talks on any such issue; if there is a concern; channels of communications are always open, said Kashyap."
He was also open to discussions on the alleged copyrights issue on Bollywood movies on Google. Many Bollywood producers have alleged that Google violates copyrights of movies by running them without permission on the site.
"If there is any copyrights issue, consumers can write to us and we will pull off the movie from the site", he said.
Cassidy was defensive on Google’s new China search engine Google.cn which censors many web sites that question the Chinese government by filtering sites. She said through Google.cn, the company has been able to increase access to more users.
While defending its decision to comply with the regulatory system of China, she said "the new service expands access to information for Chinese users.”
Google – whose mission statement is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," actually derives its name from "Googol," the mathematical term for ‘a 1 followed by 100 zeros‘ which was coined by Milton Sirotta.
Google presently has headcount of 700 at its Hyderabad facility and plans to tap the best talent in the market for creating its place in the rapidly growing ad revenue market in the country.