Indians are adapting to the digitalization and mobility wave in a big way: By 2015, Indians will collectively download more than 9 billion applications on their mobiles and tablets! Just to give you a comparison of growth, in the year 2012, 1.56 billion apps were downloaded in India, which shows that this sector will witness 75% compound annual growth rate.
These facts were shared in a joint study conducted by ASSOCHAM and Deloitte titled: ‘Digitization & Mobility’. This study was conducted for the age group 16-30.
Some exciting insights from this study:
Recently held general elections have brought in a ‘paradigm shift’ in the usage of the social media and digital platform. As per the study, 29 million Internet users made 227 million interactions on Facebook and 60 million Tweets right from the day elections were announced till results came out.
Gaming niche is taking off inside India in a big way: the current market size has been estimated as $5.6 billion. Several International ‘gaming products’ such as Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Clash of Clans etc are very popular in India as well.
Mobile TV is also witnessing incredible growth rate: In the last year, viewership on mobile has increased 400%. Youtube is being accessed by 35% of smartphone users in India, who are spending on an average 1.5 hours / month.
Mobile traffic generated from videos is set to rise from 41% in 2012 to 64% in 2017. This fast growth has prompted several Internet-TV and Pay-TV services from companies such as BigFlix, Dish TV etc.
Challenges Which India Face Right Now:
Despite such tremendous growth rate, and possibility of even more mobility, Indian market is facing several challenges as well. The report observes the following challenges:
– Monetization: Indians are reluctant to spend money to access digital information. Example being games: despite cheap pricing strategy, less Indians are buying games on their smartphones/tablets. The report mentions that monetization is the biggest worry as of now as advertisement based monetization method is unsustainable.
– Device Compatibility and Bandwidth issues are also stopping this growth as most of the India is still lacking 3G service; and 4G has been rolled out only in few cities. Internet speed is slow in rural India, and videos and Internet based games needs continuous streaming to achieve the best experience.
– Local content: There is a dearth of information in local content, which is another, big challenge. As a large part of the Indian population doesn’t speak or write English, we need more local content to spur this growth rate.
What are your suggestions to make this incredible growth story even more exciting and long term? Do share your views by commenting right here!
