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Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2017: Consumers are winning the India Internet race

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Riddhi Sharma
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Mary Meeker's Internet trends Slides

Mary Meeker's Internet trends report is the most sought after slide deck in Silicon Valley. This year her slide deck included a total of 355 slides with a special section on India which says,

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INDIA INTERNET = COMPETITION CONTINUES TO INTENSIFY…CONSUMERS WINNING

Internet Users Mary Meeker

  • Internet usage
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As per Mary Meeker's 2016 report India had 277 million Internet users surpassing the US and second only to China. In 2017, India saw internet user count grow 28 percent to 355 million — second behind China.

  • Growth of Smartphones

There is no question over the increasing growth rate of mobiles in India. India’s smartphone shipments are growing at 15 per cent year-on-year if the first quarter of 2017 is taken into account. Our mobile markets are currently facing stiff competition from Chinese mobile companies like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo. They continue to make gains with smartphones getting cheaper and better, says the report.

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The report also showcases how Indian companies like Lava, Micromax, and Jio are now fighting for the low-cost 4G feature phone. However, the price of smartphones is still very high at 8 percent of average annual GDP per capita. Our data costs have dropped from 3 percent to 1.3 percent since 2015, allowing more people to afford using a phone more.

  • Data Usage

The data wars at home definitely have a great role to play in India's data consumption numbers. India saw a 10 percent decline in data costs per GB decline on quarterly basis, while voice costs declined 4 percent quarter on quarter.  after the entry of Jio in the market, incumbent players lost subscribers and cut data prices further. By March 2017, the average cost of 1GB of data was down by 20, if we include Jio, the average cost per GB stood at $0.33 or Rs 21 by March 2017.

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Meeker's report definitely has a special mention to the entry of Jio in the market, because of whom the existing players lost subscribers and cut data prices further.

  • Mary Meeker's Internet trends Slides

  •  Mobile internet

Indian Mobile Internet usage is increasing as the cost of bandwidth is declining. India is now the number one global market for time spent on Android.  The market is growing at a very quick rate, so much that the number of Google Play downloads in India have crossed the US market for the year 2016, excluding China from the dataset.

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  • Mobile Web Traffic

On the global average chart for Mobile traffic we are second to Nigeria and in India, the mobile web traffic is 80 percent. So, our weekly time spent on a mobile is 7X spent of the time spent on a television set.  Indians spend 45 percent of their time on mobile phones.

  • Mary Meeker's Internet trends Slides

    Popular Mobile Apps

No guesses here, India’s top downloaded Android app is WhatsApp, followed by Facebook Messenger. The Indian apps  JioTV and HotStar feature in the bottom two downloads in the top 10 list. While the list includes four apps from the US, two from China (these include ShareIt and UC Web).

Mary meeker's report also highlight's Prime Minister Modi’s banking, Aadhar, power, broadband and startup initiatives.