Yahoo! India delivers 30% of global IP

BANGALORE: An increasing proportion, close to 30%, of Yahoo’s intellectual property development is taking place out of the firm’s Bangalore research centre as it looks to capitalise on local talent and focus on emerging markets, reports Our Bureau.

The proportion is sharply higher than the modest 12% a couple of years back with nearly 20 successful products being delivered out of India today. The share of IP from research centres within the US is close to 60% while those smattered across the world cobble up the rest 10%.

“Our share of intellectual property grew rapidly as we got deeply involved to take end to end responsibility of number of global as well as regional products. Yahoo! India R&D has become the second largest centre globally reflecting the growing commitment Yahoo! has to this centre,” says Shouvick Mukherjee, Chief Executive and Vice-President of Yahoo! India R&D. “Over the last one year, we have really moved from just affecting the bottomline to making a strategic impact. The company is seeing more value, which is leading to an increased investment and focus in the India R&D centre.

When you are handling complete end-to-end products you get a lot more domain expertise compared to when you are doing just some bits and pieces of development,” he specifies.

The high proportion of IP development — consultancy Zinnov pegs the normal level at sub-10 % — is because Yahoo realigned its product development to the needs of the emerging markets and follow a more regional approach. “The market interface was lagging about 18 to 20 months back,” says Mukherjee.

He says since more than 50% of Yahoo’s user base is outside of the US, the internet giant needs to focus more on the growth markets in its research and product development efforts. Another change, Mukherjee says, has been the external benchmarking of the research centre — by users — as against an internal benchmark that used to happen earlier on.