Freelancer.com Launches Indian Marketplace for Professionals to Hire, Work and Transact in Rupees

NEW DELHI, Feb. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace today launched its newest dedicated country marketplace at www.freelancer.in.

Chief Executive Matt Barrie, in New Delhi for the launch, said at the press conference, "India is critical to our success. Over 1.2 million of 3 million plus users on our site come from India, making them number one by nationality, and the second largest user demographic in our global marketplace. We are pleased to now launch Freelancer.in to provide better features and support for India."

A major functionality of the new site is the ability to transact in rupees. This enables employers to hire locally and makes payments easier because freelancers can withdraw their funds directly to their local bank account, using Express Withdrawals. India is the first country to offer Express Withdrawals. It removes the need to use expensive third party online payment systems, meaning freelancers receive their earnings faster!

India is also moving rapidly up the ranks of employers on site. To date, over 127,000 jobs have been posted by employers in India, representing 9% of the 1.4 million projects posted on site. Among employers, India now ranks third, after the United States and United Kingdom. Over Rs. 5.8 lakh crore has been paid out worldwide to date.

As the largest freelancer user base on the global marketplace, Indian workers excel at programming in PHP (8.0%), Website Design (7.5%), Graphic Design (4.8%), SEO (4.5%), Data Entry (3.6%) and Copywriting (3.3%).

Indian freelancers are hired most often by employers in the United States (40.8%), United Kingdom (11.6%), India (8.2%), Australia (6.0%) and Canada (5.0%). Indian employers, in turn, most often hire other Indians (13.6%), Americans (3.2%), Bangladeshis (2.5%), Pakistanis (2.5%) and Filipino (1.6%) freelancers to work for them.

"India already represents 38% of our user base, but there is tremendous potential for India to cement its status as the freelancing superpower as the other 90% of its 1.2 billion population goes online. The economic and social benefit delivered to the population is immense when one can now go online and earn what might typically be their month's wage in a few hours or days; all in a technical area that might otherwise be unavailable in their local environment," said Matt Barrie, Chief Executive of Freelancer.com.

"Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs and business owners to start companies. Whether you're looking to start a business and need a digital workforce to help you, or you're a freelancer looking to start a service providing business- Freelancer.in is the place for Indian entrepreneurs to get going. There's nothing MSMEs can't achieve with Freelancer.in," he concluded.

About Freelancer

Webby award winning Freelancer.com is the largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace in the world. Through Freelancer.com, businesses connect with over 3 million independent professionals from all over the world. Employers can hire freelancers in areas such as software, writing, data entry and design, right through to engineering and the sciences, sales & marketing and accounting & legal services. The average job is under US$200, making Freelancer.com extremely cost effective for small businesses, which often need a wide variety of jobs to be done, but cannot justify the expense of hiring full time.

SOURCE Freelancer.com