OMARKassim.com

Just had a listen to Paul Kenny’s interview on yesterday’s Business Breakfast on Dubai Eye 103.8 (Available here: http://jdp.do/tYyheB).

Interesting Numbers:

• 1 million user signed up
• 80K to 100K visitors daily
• 55% of the audience is Arabic speaking
• 90% of merchants are repeat merchants
• Electronics - Month 1 - USD 300K revenue
• Fashion - Week 1 - 1000 units sold
• Approximately 10% of coupons not redeemed

Mobile App:

• 13,000 downloads of Cobone’s mobile app (iOS only, Android in 2 weeks)
• 3% mobile app users consuming on the site. I would peg that at 400 active users so far.

Doesn’t add up:

• Paul: “Almost 100,000 coupons sold”
• Cobone.com currently states 492,995 coupons sold. Since the site launched in August 2010 - that leaves 3 months to sell an additional 392,995 coupons. Something doesn’t add up.
• Paul: Savings of USD 25 million = AED 91,850,000
• Cobone.com currently states AED 97,838,035.86 saved leaving a gap of AED 5,988,035
• A pretty sizeable difference in the numbers, especially in terms of coupons sold.

Late night analysis.

Update: Paul tweeted out to me say that it was a 5am start and he got the number of coupons wrong. Ah well!

With coupons being the hottest “me-too” area at the moment, there seems to be a new player starting up every week. Here’s my list of current players in Dubai. I’ll try to update it as and when players arrive and leave the market.

In no particular order:

• Gonabit - Local, backed by Bayt.com
• Cobone, Local, backed by Jabber Internet Group & external partners.
• Groupon - Chicago based, backed by it’s well known parent.
• livingsocial (coming soon) - Washington DC based, invested in by Amazon.
• Deal Gobbler - Local, unknown backers
• Dealaboo - Local, unknown backers

8th June 2011 - An update to my first list:

• Moosavings - Local, backed by Cactimedia
• YallaBanana - Local, backed by Turret Digital

It’s not that big a market folks.