India is at an inflection point in terms of Internet penetration growth, according to KPCB partner Mary Meeker's 2015 Internet trends report.
India is at an inflection point in terms of Internet penetration growth, according to KPCB partner Mary Meeker's 2015 Internet trends report. It is the largest country in terms of new Internet user additions, adding 63 million Internet users by the end of 2014. This is more than double of China which added that 31 million Internet users during the year.
China is however still the largest Internet market globally with 629 million Internet users with India ranking third with 232 million Internet users, a 37% increase from previous year. Globally, there are 2.8 billion Internet users, which accounts for 39% of world's population by the end of 2014.
Some highlights from the report:
- Mobile Penetration: The increase in Internet users is led by a significant growth in smartphone subscription in India, that grew by 55% to 140 million subscriptions for the year. Smartphones now account for around 15% of the total mobile subscriptions in India and 11% of Indian population are on smartphones as of now. Mobile contributed for 65% of India's Internet traffic as of May 2015.
India, China and Brazil are leading the smartphone growth worldwide, that witnessed a 23% increase to 2.1 billion smartphone subscriptions.
- Mobile E-commerce: India seems to be the leader in the switch to mobile for e-commerce companies, with mobile platform accounting for 41% total e-commerce sales in 2014. The report notes that Indian e-commerce leaders are also more mobile-centric as compared to global leaders. Mobile accounts for around 75% of Snapdeal's orders and around 70% of Flipkart's orders. This has probably incentivised e-tailers like Myntra to chuck the desktop site and adopt an app-only model.
- Mobile wallets: With poor credit and debit card penetration in the country, usage of mobile wallets is increasing with e-commerce adoption. The report suggests that Paytm is a clear leader in the country with around 80 million wallet users, that has apparently grown 17x in the past year. Update: The Mary Meeker report has been updated to remove the slide related to Mobile wallets. Mobikwik has also written in to say they have more than 17 million wallets and not less than 10 million wallets as suggested by the report.
- India is either the largest or the second largest market for Global Internet leaders like Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon.
- Messaging apps are most used apps in India: 3 of the top 10 most used Android Apps in India are messaging apps, two of which are owned by Facebook. WhatsApp leads the pack followed by Facebook's Messenger at fourth spot and Hike Messenger at eight spot. Gaming comes next with Candy Crush Saga at sixth spot and Subway Surfers at ninth spot.
- Similarly, 7 of the top 10 most used apps globally are messaging apps and about six of them rank top in terms of number of sessions. Meeker added that messaging apps is not a one-size-fits all category and many people use different messaging apps for different purposes. Asian messaging apps like LINE, WeChat are showing the way for US players on what to implement next.
- Apple is the top Internet company in terms of market cap followed by Google, Alibaba, Facebook and Amazon. The total market cap of the top 15 Internet companies is $2.4 trillion.
- Video accounted for 64% of consumer Internet traffic worldwide in 2014, up from 62% in 2013 and 57% in 2012. Mobile video accounted for 55% of mobile traffic in 2014, up from 52% in 2013 and 50% in 2012.
- Mobile Advertising revenues is growing strongly at 34% year-on-year but still accounts for only 14% of the total Internet advertising market.
- Full-screen vertical video ads are being fully viewed 9x more than horizontal mobile video ads on Snapchat.
