Scoot.com, the online publishing and information group, aims to increase revenue from £16m to £1bn within five years - if its relaunch next month is successful.

Robert Bonnier, chief executive, said yesterday the launch of Scoot.com2 on April 28 would deliver a platform that was more user friendly to consumers and businesses users.

Scoot.com clients will be able to find a product or service using a an improved search system on its directory, ask for a quote for a service and make online reservations.

"We are very confident that within five years we will have 2m transactions a day across Europe and that we can make £1.50 per transaction," Mr Bonnier said at the SG Cowen Global Technology Conference. "It looks very ambitious from where the company stands today."

In 1999 the company lost £20.6m. To meet Mr Bonnier's target sales need to grow by 129% annually for five years.

Scoot.com has 350,000 users, mainly small to medium size businesses, in the UK, Netherlands and Belgium. Of these only 7,000 are paying clients, with an average transaction generating £1 in revenue.

Scoot.com's estimates of client numbers have been questioned. Mr Bonnier said: "We never get complaints from our investors or analysts. We've previously explained that it was just somebody bad-mouthing the company. This is a very evolving business and we try to reflect the underlying business numbers as accurately as possible."

Scoot.com has also had problems attracting advertisers to its directory service. The annual fee of £700 was considered too high by some and that charge has been cut to £200 a year plus a per-transaction levy.

Mr Bonnier said the relaunch would attract more advertisers and he predicted the number of companies listing with Scoot.com in Britain would grow from 20,000 to 200,000 in the next three years.

Scoot.com expects 80% of its revenues to come from requests for household, gardening and office services. Those areas currently account for 55% of sales.

Mr Bonnier is also counting on the group's joint venture with Vivendi, announced earlier this year, to drive subscriber numbers. Vivendi owns 65% of the venture and will invest to help expand Scoot.com across Europe. It has an 11% stake in Scoot.com.

"We want to build a pan-European service within the next five years but it is a very rapidly changing landscape and it won't give us five years," Mr Bonnier said.

Scoot.com is launching in France in September and has brought forward its launch in Germany and Italy to December.