Google Hopes India Internet Users To Reach 300 Million

Google hopes that internet users in India will triple by 2014, telecom operators are investing in wireless broadband infrastructure and smartphones are getting cheaper, said Friday.

Country Manager, Google India, Ananda Rajan, told the Wall Street Journal that the company expects that India must be at least 300 million Internet users by 2014, up to about 100 million today.

Only eight percent of its 1.2 billion people online, India is already the third largest market of Internet users, behind China and the United States.

“Despite a large number of infrastructure problems that we as a nation, 100 million Indians are online,” Anandan, a former Microsoft executive, who took charge of operations in India in March, Google said newspaper.

“We spend enormous amounts of time online, and they do a diverse number of things online.”

However, capitalizing on this emerging huge audience will be difficult in a country where television and newspapers attract the most publicity and the government to lift regulatory barriers.

“Making money with the public increasingly, however, is difficult to date to Google and other Internet companies,” said Anandan newspaper.

Online advertising spending in India is only about $ 200 million annually – a small fraction of the $ 80 billion of global digital advertising business.

E-commerce and sales of tickets and movie tickets generate about $ 5 billion of revenue in India from a considerable amount of $ 80 million in neighboring China, the newspaper said.

Anandan said he expected the next 200 million Indian Internet users who access the Internet especially on high-speed wireless networks that carriers are now rolling out of the country.

But for India to increase the use of the Internet is also crucial that mobile phone manufacturers to bring out the smartphones at prices that can afford the Indian masses, he said.

Tags: Asia, china, Google, India, Internaut, Microsoft, Wall Street Journal, World Wide Web