India Internet Strategy - go long and be patient
Posted by Mukund Mohan at 7/1/2008 4:51 AM and is filed under Mobile Community,India,Marketing,Links,Blogging 
Correction:
1. I hit the publish button too quick. There are many sources for # of Internet users in India.
a) Rediff: 38.5 Million, growing at 40%
b) InternetWorldStat: 42Million in 2007, 60 Million in 2008, Growing at 28%
c) Hindu: 37 Million in 2007
As I talked about it before, the the number of broadband subscribers in India is small..
1. Only 28% people have broadband access at home. Of these, over 75% have only 256 Kbps. The growth of broadband is less than 15% annually - granted this is the fastest growing of the lot but in absolute numbers still small.
2. About 10% of users come via Cyber Cafe's. For Indian Social networks and gaming sites, this is nearly 60% of their traffic.
3. Most work related Internet is heavily monitored and restricted which means your users are primarily spending time coming via home using dial up.
So, your India internet strategy better be slow and steady.
1. I hit the publish button too quick. There are many sources for # of Internet users in India.
a) Rediff: 38.5 Million, growing at 40%
b) InternetWorldStat: 42Million in 2007, 60 Million in 2008, Growing at 28%
c) Hindu: 37 Million in 2007
As I talked about it before, the the number of broadband subscribers in India is small..
1. Only 28% people have broadband access at home. Of these, over 75% have only 256 Kbps. The growth of broadband is less than 15% annually - granted this is the fastest growing of the lot but in absolute numbers still small.
2. About 10% of users come via Cyber Cafe's. For Indian Social networks and gaming sites, this is nearly 60% of their traffic.
3. Most work related Internet is heavily monitored and restricted which means your users are primarily spending time coming via home using dial up.
So, your India internet strategy better be slow and steady.
what the article forgets to factor in is that over 150-300 million people have access to corporate networks. These figure should count too..after all the MSFT /YHOO and Googs lab employee do not need access at home !! So it does skew the data points.
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Peter
The grand total of number of people in India in the IT industry is 1.6 Million not 150-300 Million. If you add NON IT people with corporate networks and even add the number of Indians living abroad who have access to the Internet its less than 30 Million.
Check out. http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10286436
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Intersting - do you see any inflection point upcoming or is 15% going to be the norm for braodban for a while to come?
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Eric
The top 3 reasons for low broadband adoption is A) cost
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