India's Internet Revolution

Aided by the plummeting smart phone prices and data charges India now has 355 million Internet users which amounts to about 27% of the population of 1.3 billion people of the country. The figures released by the Mary Meeker's annual Internet trends report, shows that India is now the next major target market for tech businesses. This year her report had a lot of focus on India. 55 of the 355 pages report were solely dedicated to the state of Internet and mobile access in India. It points out how the growing market with intense competition is ultimately benefitting the consumer. India’s Internet users continue to grow, and it now stands at 355 million Internet users, which puts India number two in the market just after China.

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 Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst. Currently she is a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Her annual Internet trends report is considered one of the most authoritative reports on the Internet economy and ecosystem around the world. Her report is much awaited as it gives an overview of the entire industry. She was once described as the "best at spotting big-picture trends" before they became big or even trends by the Fortune Magazine. She was also listed as the 77th most powerful women in the world in 2014 by Forbes

It's been a known fact for quite a while now that India's Internet revolution will be driven by the mobile phones as most of the first time Internet users are coming online via their smartphone in the country. The mobile web traffic is 80% in India, well above the global average. The Mary Meeker's Internet trends 2017 report also confirmed that India’s smartphone shipments continue to grow 15 per cent year-on-year after including the first quarter this year. Report also shows that Indians spend 45 per cent of their time on mobile phones, seven times more than they do on T.V. With phones getting cheaper and better, Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo made gains along with the Indian players like Lava, Micromax, and Jio with their low cost 4G feature phones. As the report stated it's not a “shift to mobile” as much as “the addition of mobile”, because desktop usage hasn't declined much.  

Thanks to the entry of Jio, Telecom companies like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea which maintain over 60% of the market share, were forced to cut their data rates. Google chrome, owning 32% of the market share is beaten by China's UC Web, which has 50 per cent market share. In the top 10 list of India’s top downloaded Android apps is WhatsApp, which is number one followed by Facebook Messenger and only two Indian apps, JioTV and HotStar. The Mary Meeker report also talks about the Aadhaar trends data, notes that over 82 per cent of the population is covered under this scheme. It also talks about digital payments how it is rapidly ramping up users, thanks to offline and online commerce. The report also suggests that Jio has been a driving factor in India's rapidly expanding Internet usage. 

However the report also notes that India’s Internet penetration is still at 27 per cent, which means that India still needs a lot of structural reforms to even cross the 50 per cent mark in Internet penetration. While it's true that overall prices of the smart phone and the data charges have declined, still majority of the 1.3 billion population cannot afford it. India's growing youth and its pace of job creation is out of sync. Gender disparity and female participation in the workforce stands at an abysmal 27 per cent, nearly half of the global average of about 50 per cent. This affects consumption patterns. On the infrastructure front a lot is yet to be done. On a scale of 1-8, India ranks at 4.03 below the average as per World Bank's infrastructure rankings for Asia. Hence, continue economic reforms if it wants to extend the full benefits of the digital economy to its growing population.