Global Electronics Ecommerce: Exclusive Business, Enormous Revenues 

Transparency has been the buzzword in the IT industry, but it has only been restricted to the listed companies. Most private companies are discrete about their equity base, holding revenues and investments. Global Electronics Commerce Services (GECS) is a case in point. It began operating in 1993 and has emerged as a transparent organization with its 6th annual report for 1998-99 with US GAAP accounting practices. 

GECS was one of the companies that ventured into country-wide email and EDI business rather than paging, trunk radio and other services. The company realized that money and margins would flow from data transfers and corporate clients. Since then it has not looked back and has been catapulting its corporate clients up the value chain by adding other valued added 



services like virtual private networks, data centers and internet bandwidth services. 

The company aims to enable organizations to get online and effectively manage the extraprise organization. Although a category A ISP it has refrained from focusing on the new–maximum subscribers or ‘eyeballs’ business model.

Instead it prefers to facilitate its 10,000-20,000 odd corporate customers to scale up the demand and supply chain, creating extraprise organizations. Its business strategy also includes building payment gateways and reducing time lags characteristic of the financial market. Check payments consume around three days for local transactions and 10 to 15 days for outstations. The company intends to reduce this time to 10 minutes. It has tied up with HDFC, Citibank and Deutsche bank and expects the payment gateway to be ready by early February 2000. Of course, GECS will derive revenues from the transaction. Further, its investment in data centers ranging from

Rs 40 to 50 crore is also targeted at enabling corporates to scale up the value chain. 

The company has begun the year on a good note with reports, which the company denies, that MCI Worldcom is keen to pick up about 5% at a value of Rs180

crore. This places the total value of the company at Rs3,600 crore. The company has made large investments with net fixed assets worth Rs111.5 crore in 1998-99, up from Rs0.88 crore in 1995-96. With all the investments in place, the company is now ready to reap a rich harvest and one can expect it to sizzle in the current year.