At the junction of ~2-trillion business
Last year, when the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was questioned by the Supreme Court why the process of e-auction could not be adopted by the cricket body like other public sector undertakings such as Coal India to sell Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights, it had replied that cricket was not coal.
The BCCI bat, however, swung in a different direction this year. The board on Thursday sold the IPL media rights to Star India for ~61.38 billion through an e-tender process on mjunction, India’s largest online business-to-business platform.
“BCCI reached us through word of mouth. It received feedback from the Department of Telecom for whom we had conducted e-auction of telecom spectrum,” says mjunction Chief Executive Officer Vinaya Varma.
mjunction, or multiple junction as Varma puts it, which has facilitated sale of 14 million tonnes of steel, 300 million tonnes of coal and over 100,000 carats of uncut diamonds so far, will now be looking to allocate land for state governments on its platform. It is also studying the minerals sector to bring new products on-board.
The portal, which started as a joint venture between Tata Steel and Steel Authority of India Ltd for ~80 million in 2011, witnessed deals worth ~2 trillion in FY18 on the platform, says Varma.
Last year, the Kolkatabased company was appointed by the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons to build a platform for them to enable ebidding and e-allocation of oil and gas fields. This move is expected to facilitate transparent allocation of natural resources and reduce the country’s oil import bill by $8 billion annually as these fields start producing oil in the next five years, according to the petroleum and natural gas ministry officials.
Claiming to be bigger than other e-commerce players such as Amazon and Flipkart in terms of gross merchandise value, mjunction says it became profitable since day one. “Unlike other e-commerce platforms which keep on scaling up and burning cash in the hope that they will become profitable in the future, we start small and once the vertical starts showing profitability, we scale up,” says Varma. After expanding to all major Indian cities, West Asia, Australia and Singapore, the company has picked up businesses in Europe and will be setting up its first European office in the UK in FY19.
The firm hopes all businesses will soon adopt e-commerce for transactions.