Renamed cellbazaar looks to turn profitable in 7 yrs

The online marketplace cellbazaar.com, formally renamed ekhanei.com on Tuesday, looks to be a profitable venture within seven years.
Norwegian telecom giant Telenor and another Norwegian company Schibsted Media Group formed a joint venture--SnT Classifieds (SnT C) that owns the ekhanei.com. Each of them possesses 50 per cent of the shares of the company.
"Currently we don't make any profit…. but our target is to start making profit in next seven years and the profit will come from commercial advertisements," Arild Klokkerhaug, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company, told The Financial Express on Tuesday at the sideline of an inaugural function of ekhanei.com.
Telenor began cellbazar in 2006 providing services as an innovative SMS service. Its e-commerce website has been in operation since 2007, according to the new website.
Schibsted Media Group has joined the company investing Tk 250 million.
Schibsted is a global giant in media and classified ads operating in about 35 countries across the globe and has been operating since 2001.
Arild Klokkerhaug said, "We just crossed the impressive number of one million likes on our facebook page.  As Internet spreads to the most remote corners of Bangladesh, we decided to change our name to a truly local and more relevant name. It is completely free to post an ad on Ekhanei.com, and we want to tell people that wherever you are in Bangladesh, we are right here, Ekhanei!"
Service of ekhanei.com allows anyone in Bangladesh to buy and sell in their region conveniently in a very simple manner without registration and complicated procedures.
Country's other leading online market places are: bikroy.com and olx.com.bd.
Speaking at the press conference, Arild said earlier only men would use the services online market place. Today, women and even elderly persons are interested in using the services.
He informed everyday ekhanei.com conducts 6,000 transactions.
He said they have taken all measures to check selling stolen goods on ekhanei.com.
"To ensure that fraud and trade of stolen goods does not happen on our site, Ekhanei.com uses advanced software to auto-detect potential fraud. More importantly, it has the most experienced team of specially trained moderators who check every submitted ad very carefully against many criteria and reject every ad that seems suspicious," he said.
Arild said the first change customers will see in the site is a cleaner looking homepage that encourages them to select their home location. This is done because buying and selling goods between consumers is very dependent on nearness.  The new homepage also includes the seven most popular categories of the site, allowing customers to more conveniently access the most wanted types of items.
In the past, mainly cars, properties and electronics were bought and sold through online classified, mainly by men, the recent trends show that more women use the site to buy and sell furniture, home appliances, hobby, sport and lifestyle products.
All features and services on Ekhanei.com are now available in both Bangla and English over web and mobile, with an easy tab option to switch between the two languages.
Users can avail the services of this online classified website throughout the country. Every ad and every user profile is just how it was on Cellbazaar.com so the change will only positively affect all users.