Nike in pact with Rediff to sell range via portal
Business Standard, (Corporate Bureau), June 7, 2000

American sports shoe giant Nike Inc has signed up an alliance with Internet portal Rediff.com to sell its range of products in India, Satyen Patel, general manager of Nike Inc for south-east Asia, said on Tuesday.

"This arrangement with Rediff.com is a unique one for Nike in a market that we consider to be a priority," he told Reuters ahead of a news conference to announce the alliance.

He said Rediff will host Nike's India specific on-line shopping site www.nikeshop.rediff.com.

Nike has been present in India for the past four years through a local distributor.

The online alliance will cater to the large number of expatriate Indians worldwide, he said.

"We have got very aggressive plans of the brick and mortar side of the business. This tie-up complements that," he said.

Currently, Nike has no plans to launch its own India specific website for retail selling of products, Patel said.

"We may launch a website for purposes other than retail selling very soon. This is on an experimental basis, though the benchmark would be the kind of business which we get from a similar tie-up in the US, Patel said.

Nike has a similar tie-up with a sports portal fogdog.com in the US. It plans to raise the number of its retail outlets in India to 80 in the next one year from the present 50, Hemendra Jhaveri, Nike's chief operating officer in India said.

Nike does not have its is own production facility in India but would set up a unit when the company considers it necessary, Jhaveri said.

The company did not disclose any financial details about its tie-up with Rediff.com. Officials at Rediff.com did not comment on the tie-up.

Rediff has filed papers with the US Securities & Exchange Commission to make an initial public offering of 4.6 million American Depositary Shares (ADS), which represents 2.3 million equity shares.

It will be India's first dotcom company to list on a US stock exchange.

It has set a price range of $10 to $12 for each ADS.

Rediff's backers include Intel Corp and General Electric Co's GE Capital Services.