MUMBAI, JUNE 28: Are internet companies going out of business? Yahoo! co-founder chairman Jerry Yang dismisses the theory that more Internet companies are going out of business now than ever before.``It's just that they are more visible now. The mortality rate remains just what it was a few years ago. It's just that these companies are going public faster than they should and, thereby, attract more attention,'' the Yahoo! founder says. Yang, who founded Yahoo! along with David Filo, is in the city to launch Yahoo!'s India segment. Yahoo!, which is barely five years old, is the world's most popular site and did $1 billion worth of B2C (business to customer) transactions in the first quarter of this year."The key factor about the Internet is not the idea or the business model, what it takes is strategy and execution to succeed,'' Yang said while addressing a meeting of the Advertising Club. "By 2003, $1 trillion of B2C e-commerce is expected on the Net, and just half of that will be out of the US," stresses Yang, thereby rationalizing Yahoo!'s move to establish a presence in the "Internet-populated" regions of the world.Dwelling on the shape of B2C in the years to come, pure Net plays and otherwise, Yang feels both have a place at any given time. "The questions Internet businesses should really be asking are: Do I make a difference to people's lives? Am I doing things that influence consumers everyday? These have to be the focus areas for business on the Net," Yang said.Replying to a question on whether it was B2B or B2C that was likely to rule the roost, Yang said: "Investors and others may look for a theme or a pattern in the Internet business, but honestly neither B2B nor B2C is going away. The Net is going to get more ubiquitous than ever, and both businesses will have to follow parallel tracks."Explaining Yahoo!'s move to establish a local presence in various countries across the world, Yang said: "We need to be in all Internet-populated centres. We cannot be just an American company, we need to be a local company doing local business everywhere.""The battle for the next five years is not how many customers we get, but how many we keep. Are we doing the things that people need? Are we getting indispensible? These are questions that we ask ourselves continuously," he said.Yang threw some light on the quirky name for the portal he founded as a student out of Stanford - "Yahoo! stands for an indecent, uncivilized character in Gullivers Travels, and that's what we thought of ourselves back then," he added.Yahoo! at last count (March 2000) had 140 million users, over a 125 million of them in its registered user base, and over 22 properties worldwide. The net revenue of the company for fiscal 1999 stood at $ 589 million, up from 140 per cent in the previous year. The company acquired GeoCities for $ 4.6 billion and Broadcast.com for $ 5.7 billion last year.
