Brightcom Group Limited (Formerly Lycos Internet) - Way to Digitalization

You may need to read a bit more about the company to understand them better. I am assuming you are interested so I will give you a brief intro and you can then read their previous AR’s to build the picture. Their main (In my opinion almost 90% of their top and bottom line) is digital marketing, for which they have a separate entity called Brightcom. This is a top rated player in a highly fragmented market globally. Pls visit their website to know more about what they do. There are no comparable listed peers, so very few have a good understanding of their business or how it works, If you want to understand, pls read the AR, con call transcripts and attend the con calls so you can ask Suresh. The whole industry is very fragmented and a non linear one, so don’t expect to see 1000s of employees. Even Tinbu generates 100m with just 50 employees.

The other part of their business is the software dev part which is the legacy part of their business, something that fell in their lap when they reverse merged their company (Ybrant Digital as it was called back then) with LGS Global. As per mgmt this isn’t their focus anymore but I have never understood why they have not wound this down. Anyways, have never focussed much here, given the main attraction of this company is as a digital marketing company.

The other, much smaller parts of what they have been trying are

  • Lycos Media - this is their suite of websites, where they play the role of a website publisher. I don’t think they have any branding, competitive power, and it helps generate little footfall. The only reason this fits within their overall strategy is that it helps monetise whatever little traffic they get on some of these websites.

  • Lycos Life - their health band product. Very debatable whether this is worth it or not. Personally don’t think this is even worth the effort.

  • Misc like their JV with Apollo to develop an e-commerce platform. complete waste of time.

Everything else they do apart from digital marketing is frankly not material at least in the current scheme of things. The mgmt tries various things because they have a view on how technology is playing out and they want to experiment. Why they do this is beyond me.

However, as a digital marketing company, I think they are very credible and making good progress. Visit their Brightcom website, maybe it will give you a picture.

If you still feel due to Life/Media/Apollo this is a company not worth investing in, then fair enough and each one to his own,

Btw - their shopping website is a shocker. The links all point to some other digital marketing firm. maybe something worth asking the mgmt in the next con call.

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