The authoritative Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, finds that just 27 per cent of India's population—355 million users—is Internet ready. But the country is number one in other ways: in the Android market for example with the highest number of Google Play downloads.
India’s smartphone shipments grew to 15 per cent year-on-year with Chinese players—Lenovo, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo making big gains, while Indan players like Micromax, Reliance Jio and Lava are aggressively into the affordable 4G phone business. The entry of Reliance Jio’s Lyf brand handset has intensified the fight in the smartphone market.
The mobile web traffic in India is 80% of all Internet. Indians spend 45 per cent of their time on mobile phones and over a week, 7 times more time on phones compared to TV. And what do they do on their phones? Entertainment (45 per cent), followed by Search, social media and messaging ( 34 per cent). News trails at just 2 per cent.
Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea command over 60 per cent share of broadband subscribers, , but with the entry of Reliance Jio they have had to sharply cut data rates. The average cost of 1GB of data was down by 20 per cent and Jio subscribers paid an average cost per GB of $0.33 or Rs 21 by March 2017
Interestingly, while Google Chrome has 32 per cent of the mobile OS market share in India, it is second to China’s UC Web which has 50 per cent
India’s top downloaded Android app is WhatsApp, followed by Facebook Messenger. There are only only two Indian apps are in top ten: JioTV and HotStar.
On the e-biz front, Amazon dominates, though Indian players Flipkart, Snapdeal, PayTM etc are competing aggressively.
Aadhaar, the Indian universal ID, has covered over 82 per cent of the population. Possibly as an effect of this, e-payments via mobile stood at $359 million till March 2017.
Full report here. The India-specific portions can be found between pages 232 and 287.
