India Internet penetration still has long way to go

03rd June 2017
India Internet penetration still has long way to go

Bangalore, June 3 2017:  The authoritative  Internet Trends report from  Mary Meeker,  partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,   finds that just 27 % 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 Chinwese 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 %), followed by Search, social media and messaging ( 34%).  News trails at just  2  %.
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