For Rajan Anandan, managing director and VP sales and operations, Google India, the SME and mobile segment are throwing immense opportunities. From an SME perspective Anandan says Google's intent in India is to make it an online and mobile first advertisement market. He also the internet consumption story on mobile is a different story from the last few years, with 70 million users accessing internet through handsets, and of which 20 million access internet only through mobilephones. In a chat with Shivani Shinde, he talks about Google’s mobile push, SME focus and the hot-and-cold vibes that it shares with government. Edited excerpts.
You said on an average Indian smartphone user spends 72 minute per day for accessing internet, but isn’t it only for social networking?
The Indian mobile users have evolved over the last few years. According to a Nielsen survey, of that 72 minute, over 80% of time is spent on searching products and services. Less than 30% of the time is spent on social media platforms. India has 137 million Internet users, of this 70 million mobile internet users. Of this 70 million, 20 million access internet only through mobile. The BFSI survey we have done shows mobile queries going up by 3x times.
Google launched its mobile advertisement platform in India some time back, how has been the response?
Our mobile foray has two components, GoMo and Let’s talk about Mo. There are three pillars of our mobile foray. The first is educating the advertisers about the mobile platform and for that we have been doing road-shows. This is important as many advertisers are now getting digital, and we are already moving to the mobile platform.
The second part is, under the Let’s talk about Mo initiative we launched the GoMoMeter, a website testing tool. You can enter your website URL and it lets you know how mobile ready is your website. Many companies have websites but do not work well on phones. Most of the websites in India are not mobile ready.
GoMo (Go Mobile) basically helps customers to improve their websites and be mobile ready and in cases of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) we build a mobile ready websites.
What has been the response so far?
The response has been fantastic. We have had hundreds of brands using our GoMoMeter, this included large brands too.
SME is the other big focus for Google India, how are you taking the mobile offering there?
SMEs are going digital in a large way. Mobile is much more easier for them. Our intent in India is to make it an online first, mobile first advertisement market. Here is the reason. India has 12 million SME’s with over 5 employees. Only 150,000 advertise in any medium. 10,000 advertise on TV, 7,000 advertise on radio and 103,000 advertise on print. Ideally all of 12 million should advertise to drive revenue for their business.
For SME’s the advantage of online and mobile advertisement is, it brings down the cost dramatically and it is entirely performance based. If they don’t get a lead they do not pay.
That explains the advertisement part for SMEs, the other offering we have is cloud services. We already have over 200,000+ SMEs on our cloud services. They are already using services like Mail and docs.
Microsoft’s AppFest created world record recently and is going aggressive with Windows 8 release nearing, Is Google doing anything developers in India?
We are very focussed on the Android ecosystem. We believe that you need to have a killer product and app developers will get excited about the platform. There are 500 million users today using Android. That’s a pretty decent number.Our focus is on how do we get more users on the android platform.
Of course we will also launch the Android market place in India. You will hear some announcement on that over the next several months. I can only say, the world record pale’s in front of the app developers we have on Android.
One of the concern from the government officials on the legal issues have been the time taken by firms like you and others is the delay is response time. Comment.
I think we have been working well with the government. I know there have been concerns on both sides. But if you take some of the most recent issues we were very responsive. When we were notified about such requests we have acted immediately. Of course we have an internal process but we do have an accelerated response. The world is also learning to deal with internet. But we are very clear that we will always follow local law, we are here to stay and third we want to make internet more and more useful to businesses and people.
