Monday, October 24, 2011

How does Infibeam make money on Pi2?

While browsing the Infibeam website, I noticed that they had launched their new ebook reader with a touchscreen, to rival Amazon's Kindle. They price it at Rs 9999, and give 10 vouchers of Rs 1000 each. Hence, effectively, the kindle seems free. This strategy is not unique having been followed earlier by Gilette(sell the razor and earn money on the blades). A friend tells me that Amazon's Kindle costs over $150. Assuming that Infibeam can manufacture at the same cost(despite India's higher tax and cost structure), that means it would make a 20% gross profit on the same. Given that Infibeam's discount on books is 25%-40%(on average), it would not make more than 15%-20% gross profits on books. So they are effectively giving away their profits and making no profit on no loss on the transaction. So what is going on here? Why would anyone do it? The reason in my view is that
  1. Boosting revenue multiples:-When dotcoms are valued on revenue multiple basis, then there is no reason why Infibeam should not book Rs 20,000 despite the transactions cancelling out each other
  2. Shrinkage:-As any coupon seller knows, not all gift cards/coupons are used. Even taking a 30% shrinkage, that is money directly to the bottomline. And to encourage that shrinkage, Infibeam has
    1. Limited the usage to 1 voucher/transaction=>If an item costing>Rs 1000 is purchased, then the user ends up paying cash for the difference. 
    2. Relatively low limit(Rs 1000) for the voucher
    3. Time limit of 6 months to use 10 vouchers. That implies an order once every 18 days!
    4. Limited book selection of academic/other low profit books like NCERT etc! 
  3.  long term customer value:-Anyone who places 10 orders of books/ebooks is likely to come back for more. This would expand the market and 10orders would increase their faith in Infibeam.
 However, one important disadvantage of this is the potential of misuse for institutional purchases. If I was a librarian, I would order Pi2, and use the infibeam gift vouchers to make purchases which I may anyway have done. So the concept of incremental customer value may be defeated.

Another issue is that are 10 orders enough to make the Indian into a book buyer? Few Indians read, fewer are willing to pay. And the surfeit of pulp fiction costing less than Rs 100 has devalued the category. Would more expensive books cause Indians to pirate them online? On file sharing sites, one can download illegally the latest version of books even costing $5 or less. I think that after exhausting the vouchers, it is optimistic to expect an Indian reader to purchase ebooks rather than download them from filesharing websites.

Anyways, I shall follow this matter with interest, and update you all if I purchase that reader

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