India has witnessed perhaps the most impressive growth in the number of Internet users in the last 6 years. According to InternetWorldStats.com, in 2000, India had only 5 million Internet users but now the number has increased 10 folds to more than 50 million. In terms of number of users, India is now after US, China and Japan. Needless to say that India has a huge growth potential in this market because Internet is now available to only 5% of the population. Still, 50 million is a great figure and a great market. However, India is still far behind in terms of e-commerce. I am quoting from an article of moneycontrol.com:
"According to Subho Ray, President, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the growing comfort of transacting online, increasing brand promise and the variety of products to choose from have changed the buying behaviour of the Indian consumers.
Indians are becoming more comfortable with e-commerce as evidenced by the IAMAI Power Shopper report, which found a Rs 1180 crore e-commerce market in India in 2005-`06. This is estimated to increase 95 per cent over last year to Rs 2300 crore by 2006-07."
I am not impressed at this figure because if you divide Rs 23000 million by 50 million then you can understand that the amount of money spent by per user is even less than $10 every year. One of the major reasons for this miserable statistics is that there have not been enough websites on Indian languages. So, many people do not have much to browse for anyway. I just read an interesting report in the Financial Express about this matter and let me quote from it:
"How can India reverse this trend? The answer, the local ISP industry and tech insiders believe, lies in local language content. A recent survey by New Delhi online research consultant JuxtConsult among Net users in India showed 44% of respondents preferred sites in Hindi and another 25% wanted content in other local Indian languages.
In contrast, Hindi — the world’s third-most spoken language after Mandarin and English — finds no place among the top 10 languages on the Internet. English leads the chart, accounting for 30% of all net users, followed by Chinese with 13.8%, and Japanese with 8.3%, says InternetWorldStats.com."
I hope now you can realize the problem in India about Internet. What is needed is that big companies like Yahoo and MSN become serious about setting up web portals in Indian languages or at least in Hindi. It is really ironic that India is now the land of outsourcing but Indian net users hardly spend money on Internet. It shows that e-commerce is yet to become matured in India.
» 46 Million Internet Users in India: Is it Enough? from IndianRaj
India has a population of over 1,000 million. So, 46 million is roughly 4.6% of the population and this is not huge at all. In fact, according to a report of Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB... [Read More]
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