Can India lead the mobile-Internet revolution? Almost 1,500 years ago, Indian mathematicians, including Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, and Pingala, transformed mathematics by conceiving the rules of the binary numeral system. While those rules today lie at the heart of the code powering the Internet, India has relatively few Internet users: just 7 percent of its population is connected to the Web, compared with 32 percent in China and 77 percent in the United States. Yet India has an opportunity to lead the world once again by becoming the first truly mobile digital society. All the elements are in place: the cost of network access and handsets is going down, wireless networks are going up, and Indian consumers already display an insatiable appetite for digital services. In addition, bypassing the personal computer—moving straight to widespread mobile access—simply makes sense. It would sidestep a host of hurdles associated with delivering affordable Internet services to a population that is geographically dispersed and relatively poor, in a country where infrastructure development can be problematic. Can India actually transform itself from an Internet laggard into a world leader? The trail the country would blaze could serve as a model for other developing markets. But much depends on whether India can rediscover its revolutionary spirit and garner unprecedented cooperation and commitment from both the private and public sectors. The Indian digital consumer India’s base of 81 million Internet users is the world’s fourth largest.1 Yet this figure is a function of sheer population, not deep adoption: just 20 percent of India’s urban citizens are connected to the Internet, compared with 60 percent in China. And while China has 233 million mobile-Internet users, or 18 percent of its total population, India has just 17 million, or less than 1 percent. Even though typical Indian consumers have no Internet access, they have a remarkable appetite for digital content. In fact, they consume an average of 4.5 hours of it daily across offline channels such as television, DVDs, and CDs. And while they use mobile phones predominantly for voice services, a whole segment of business has grown around retailers essentially operating as physical iTunes stores, charging fees to load music and other content onto mobile devices. The net result is that while India is a relatively poor country, more than 70 percent of its urban consumers already spend about $1 a month on content and services through offline, unorganized retail channels—a market estimated to be worth more than $4 billion annually. The mobile Internet could deliver the personalized entertainment that Indian consumers crave. If India’s latent demand is unleashed, McKinsey research forecasts that the total number of Internet users will increase more than fivefold, to 450 million, by 2015 (exhibit). Total digital-content consumption will double, to as much as $9.5 billion. Including access charges, revenues from total digital consumption could rise fourfold, to $20 billion—twice the expected growth rate of China.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Oct 2013 07:58:51 +0000
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