How did Sri Lanka make 'Ikman' a 1800 million rupees company?

• Employee base = 400 employees

• Monthly Payroll = 10 - 20 million rupees

• Revenue = 1800 million rupees

• Ownership = Swedish

Ikman.lk (meaning, roughly, fast) is a classifieds site that took over the Sri Lankan online market within few years. They did that by spending 700 million rupees on their advertising.

We estimate the website reaches roughly 21,855 unique users each day that generate 224,357 daily page views. According to Alexa (the Web Information Company) the Global Traffic Rank is 4,326 (view Alexa traffic graphs), the website belongs to the top 100,000 most popular websites in the world.

What many Sri Lankans don’t know is that Ikman is an identical site to Bikroy.com in Pakistan, Tonaton.com in Ghana and Dheko.com.pk in Bangladesh. This company is a seemingly big international player, and they are a part of a bigger company called Saltside Technologies, a Swedish company (backed by Investment AB Kinnevik) with offices in Dubai and the places above.

Ikman Business Model

Their business model is to deploy a basic classifieds ads technology in a selected markets segment and then pump a huge sum of money into advertising it. This is what they did in Sri Lanka too. As a result of this, they’ve reached the top rank in online classifieds in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Ghana despite relatively old technology they used. In simple technical view, what you see there is a 80% static web site with very little modern interactive features. But with the support of their creative marketing campaign they know how to place that as best solution for all our classified ads needs. 

If you carefully access the way their business is growing, you will understand that they are having a long term business objective to capture Indian Market. In my analysis, I looked at the places they expands. They are evidently circling around BIG India. I mean despite the profit they make from Sri Lanka and from other countries, it is my assumption that they are aiming at India as their next growth target. We all know how big that market is, that is where the leaders in this space operate focusing to gain higher revenue, around 200 million dollars (~40, 000 million rupees) per year.

Profit Sharing

As of now the entire company is own by Saltside Technologies, unfortunately most of the money they make out of advertisement moves out from Sri Lanka. It is very interesting to analyse this in a period where government has imposed strict regulatory measure to reduce import of unwanted goods including vehicles to control dollar out-floor. However the very same rules has indirectly fuel the local second hand vehicle market where companies like ikman has made a fortune out of it. 

Future

Now ikman has strongly establish in the country to compete with its competition. They are now expanding themself to most of the other business areas including, job market, land sale, delivery etc as well. It is very clear that they are at their dawn to be the monopoly of this space. At this point they don’t have any competition; as a result of that they will continue this way for next couple of years until all the smaller player get completely removed from the market before they start dominating the market with their own prices. 

It is high time that Sri Lankans realize this!!!

Other Smaller player in the market

• https://www.sellme.lk
  
• https://www.harimila.lk
• https://quikads.lk
• https://sambole.lk
  
• https://ads.lk
• http://classified.lk/