NSIC To Unveil A New B2B Portal In October

National Small Industries Corporation Ltd. (NSIC) has announced that it will unveil a new business-to-business portal similar to Alibaba.com this October. The portal will provide small Indian businesses access to customers around the globe.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) will be able to get themselves listed on the NSIC portal for an annual fee of Rs.5,000. According to Chairman and Managing Director H P Kumar, this will allow them access to a database of more than 2,50,000 potential customers. But unlike Alibaba.com, the NSIC portal will be exclusively for SMEs.

NSIC is a government of India enterprise under the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME). It operates through countrywide network of offices and Technical Centres in the Country.

"We are building the international portal for SMEs similar to Alibaba.com. Buyers and sellers will be able to do business between themselves without any intervention," said Kumar according to The Economic Times.

The new NSIC portal will have features like hit counters for individual members who are listed on the site, he said.

The portal will also include features which will enable virtual buyer-seller meets and assist in requests of quotations for business orders. Additionally, according to Kumar, the portal will host small and medium companies' details, product catalogues and pictures and the SMEs will also be provided with market intelligence services (essentially services like product and tender tracking) at a little extra cost.

Early this year, Indiamart Intermesh Limted, the company that owns Indiamart.com (an Indian comparable of Alibaba.com), partnered with Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency recently to launch a marketplace Indiamart.com/Korea.