India missed out the computer industry race but it surely is not missing the mobile market race. According to a recent report revealed by global consultancy firm KPMG has said that the number of people surfing the Internet using mobiles in India, the world’s second largest mobile market after China, is set to touch 164.8 million by 2015.
Reported by PTI at ET, the KPMG’s ‘The SMAC Code – Embracing New Technologies for future business’ report further revealed, “The mobile Internet users in the country are expected to grow from 4.1 million users in 2009 to 164.8 million in 2015 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 85 percent.”
The other interesting facts that were revealed by the KPMG report are listed below:
1. Indians hooking on to social networking sites provides opportunities to firms for using social media to engage customers, brand building, product launches, etc.
2. The social media usage is primarily driven by the rising number of active Internet users, who are accessing Internet through a host of devices.
3. Enterprises are increasingly leveraging social media for customer engagement and brand building.
4. Proliferation of smart devices and rising mobile Internet usage has supported growth of active Internet users in the country.
5. Social media platforms are not only restricted to the social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, rather extended to various forms of social media including YouTube, blogs, social bookmarking, geo-location sites and daily deals.
On the global front the KPMG report highlighted:
1. The social commerce market is forecast to reach USD 30 billion by 2015.
2. Leading global retailers are spending between 20-25 percent of their advertising budget on social media channels.
3. Nearly 90 percent of the top global banks use social networking to achieve customer engagement.
4. Mobile technologies can be used to cut the cost of a financial transaction by up to 80 percent.
The forecast comes right after the study shared by research firm, Juxt which makes the Indian mobile space quite exciting. According to the India Mobile Landscape 2013 India has 554.8 million mobile users and 143.2 million unique Internet users. The report further adds that around 94.7 million users access internet from their desktop/laptop, smart TV or mobile data connections such as GPRS/EDGE and 3G together. The research was profiled on 121,311 individuals in 30,066 households across India.