Zoho Aims To Make India Its Top Market In 10 Years Our steady investments in research and developments (R&D) coupled with a SaaS consolidation, will be our pillars of support, says Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho

Zoho, the Chennai-headquartered global technology company, with a $1 billion revenue, is currently experiencing a slump in growth compared with last year. However, Sridhar Vembu, CEO and co-founder, Zoho, is confident of steady recovery, "The growth has slowed down compared to last year, but we are still growing at a very vibrant rate. I actually believe we can accelerate it based on all of the new product announcements we made recently. Our steady investments in research and developments (R&D) coupled with a SaaS consolidation, will be our pillars of support. Zoho is seen as one of the companies that has a long-term staying power. With our product stack, many struggling companies are benefiting and that's our growth accelerator," Vembu said.

The company launched Vikra, a seller app on the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), and Zoho IoT, a low-code platform for developing and deploying custom Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Furthermore, the company is venturing into manufacturing, with projects lined up in semiconductors, power tools, drones, medical technology, amongst others. That is also happening. amongst others. It is advancing into contextual intelligence vision, applying AI technology to enhance customer experience and offer deeper insights. This commitment is helping Zoho become a preferred partner for large enterprises and government institutions across India.

"Zoho stack is very horizontal, every business can use it. We are now verticalizing it for specialist industries, those will expand rapidly, we may announce further expansion of verticals in the next year," he said. Talking about acquisitions, he shared, "Generally our growth strategy doesn't rely on acquisitions but I never say never."

The company's top markets are North America, India and Europe. "In the next 10 years, we plan to make India our top market. Whenever a new player like Zoho emerges, the growth depends on multiple factors of a market. In a very slow growing country it is hard to keep up because companies will not be changing their technology providers much. They are already entrenched. Growth brings fresh players, new and potential customers. We can grab an increasing share of this and that's what is happening in India. In more mature markets, it's a bit harder game, but we are still gaining strength in those markets. Becoming number one in India is the goal," he explained.

The company has plans to compete in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven market with heavy investments going into AI products, "We are not AI aggressive, because we don't need to hype it up. There are companies that need to hype it up because they are raising funds. We don't need to raise funds, we only want the customers to weigh in whether we are doing it right for them or not." Furthermore, Zoho is enhancing its AI capabilities by building and deploying multiple language models—narrow, small, medium, and large—for specific use cases within various products. The company also has a strong privacy focus, ensuring that the AI models are not trained on consumer data.

Sharing Zoho's semiconductor aspirations, Vembu emphasised on the right timing. Currently, the application of a silicon carbide fab is pending with the government. "It's a rigorous evaluation criteria because the government cannot, should not commit funds without thoroughly understanding the nature of technology, licensing and other imperative parameters. We are also talking to more potential partners because this is a case where we don't have capabilities in India yet, and we have to bring in new technology from the outside. That's what we're doing right now. This has to be evaluated and the application has not been approved yet; there's no guarantee that our proposal will be approved, So that's why I want to lower the expectation on semiconductors."

On his reason for choosing Silicon Carbide (SiC) fab, he shared that a silicon fab costs around 10 billion dollars investment. "We don't have 10 billion. We can only spare a few hundred million, maybe a small number of hundreds of billions. We cannot build a billion dollar scale fab yet and so we chose this, the power electronics. It is crucial in India, we need it for trains like Vande Bharat.

SiC is a wide bandgap (WBG) material that can move electrical energy more efficiently than other semiconductors. This makes it useful for power electronics like traction inverters in electric vehicles and DC/DC converters. SiC is used in automotive lighting for LEDs, on-board DC/DC converters, off-board DC fast chargers, and on-board battery chargers and many others.

Zoho's growth has been led by demand for unified, scalable, and flexible technology solutions. The top products driving revenue growth in India are Zoho One, Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, and Zoho People. While in terms of customer growth, Zoho Books and Zoho Workplace are the fastest growing products. The sectors leading the growth are IT hardware and related services, financial services, manufacturing, retail, and non-IT professional services.