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Skali rebrands, aims for regional expansion

By Yap Cheng Teng, CNET on March 2, 2000

Summary

Skali Group, a Malaysian Internet player, has announced the completion of its corporate rebranding exercise by grouping its diverse services into two divisions.

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KUALA LUMPUR--Local Internet player Skali Group has today announced the completion of its corporate rebranding exercise, grouping its diverse services into two divisions Skali.com and Skali.net under one single brand entity Skali Group.

Skali.com is now positioned as an Asian-centric portal, providing news and general information, search and web tools for business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce while Skali.net will be the Internet resource centre, providing managed services for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce.

Said Farith Rithauddeen, president, Skali Group,"From today onwards we will be known only as Skali. Skali on its own is already a well-known brand worldwide and given the nature of our core competencies, it naturally makes good sense to build on this strength."

With the rebranding the company is set to expand itself into the region.

One of its more aggressive plans includes setting up representative offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines and Indonesia by end of June this year to aggregate partnerships.

It is also finalising another round of funding of between RM10 million to RM30 million in two weeks' time from about four local and foreign venture capitalists.

A substantial percentage of the funding will be poured into advertising, promotions and marketing, which in turn is expected to rake in a revenue of about RM12 million for the Group by the end of year 2000 from RM1.8 million revenue posted in 1999.

Currently, according to Farith, revenue streams of the company are split 50:50 between Web advertising and Web hosting.

With the formation of the two divisions, it is hoped that both Skali.net and Skali.com will bring in RM6 million each by the end of this year.

As of today, Skali.com Web site has 200,000 contents, automated updates of 1,200 news pages daily, more than 100,000 content partners worldwide, eight million page views and 160 million hits every month.

"More than 60 percent of our users are from overseas, with 35 percent from Malaysia and about 25 percent from Singapore," said Aimi Aizal Nasharuddin.

Expansion plans for Skali.com this year include, adding specific Internet contents and resources, for example, building specific urls for certain target groups like traders via or services like information alert via buzzme.

Skali.com division has also set itself a target to build 500,000 subscribers this year, added Aimi.

Meanwhile, Skali.net is aimed to be the one-stop centre in transforming traditional Malaysia businesses to become dot.com companies, offering managed data centres services, virtual servers hosting, communications consultancy and rental of business solutions and applications.

"We are like a shopping mall in terms of e-commerce applications and services. We rent out floor space, electricity, services and applications etcetra but the business is yours," he added.

According to the company, global e-commerce raked in revenues just over RM500 billion in 1999, out of which 80 percent were transactions from one business to another.

"As for Malaysia, the outlook for e-commerce is very positive. In 1999, e-commerce revenue in Malaysia was about RM200 million and this year it is expected to jump to RM500 million," said Farith.

The number is expected to double in 2001 and hitting the RM2 billion mark in 2002, he added.

Skali Group has partnerships with regional Internet players which include BuzzCity and affiliates of Chinadotcom.

The Group's initial funds of RM19 million came from Perbadanan Usahawan Nasional Berhad (PUNB).

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