Yahoo! have just taken out an expensive press ad in India that made headlines in its own right. In a field where I have an uneducated stereotyped view and consider Indian web maturity to be low and penetration to be tiny. This made me think and do some Monday-web-surfing-in-the-name-of-research. And I am glad I did.
As of the end of August ’09, broadband penetration rates were roughly 0.46% - not a lot. In numbers, that’s about 6.98million people – source TRAI.com. Not that exciting. Oh, and that’s an increase of 2.7% of from June – a steady growth rate. That’s quite a bit for a month.
That’s broadband.
Looking at overall web penetration, the ITU reckons that in 2008 only 7% of the population were connected…that’s an incredible 81million users. Er, wow.
The numbers themselves are staggering, but it’s the growth rates that are the real treasure here. In a previous life at Hutchison Telecom in the guise of Head of Online, I remember talking to the Marketing Director at Hutch India and the problems he had. Number 1 was scale; they were acquiring 750,000 new customers a month! Their infrastructure couldn’t cope – every part had to be upgraded on a monthly basis. Number 2 was that only 2% of the population has a bank account.
…3 years later and the total figure for phones is still rising dramatically:
Telephone subscribers August ’09 494.07million
Growth rate from July ’09 3.13%
= 15 million new customers in one month!
If you want to go and compare this to our puny attempts either I the UK or in Europe, go here and prepare to be underwhelmed.
In terms of the conclusion to this article, there are too many to digital ones to draw so I will leave it up to you. The one thing I would advise is to keep an eye on the emerging digital markets, where there is an explosive market, there will be exciting things happening.
