How Google played its cards right in India, and Facebook suffered

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Photo credit : Google.

That Google loves India has been proven over and over in the past few years. If love is too strong a word, the company certainly sees the world’s fastest growing economy as a huge investment opportunity.

The latest Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report says the number of internet users in India grew 40 percent in 2015 to 277 million. It is the only country where the growth rate of internet users in 2015 was higher than that in the previous year. India is also the second largest country in the world in terms of internet users, ahead of the US and behind China.

Indian PM Narendra Modi with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in California. Photo Credit: PTI.

Those stats make it is easy to see why every major tech company in the world, including the other giant, Facebook, is focusing on the country.

If Google has its phone launches and accelerators catered towards Indians, Facebook has its wifi and social media love. But, while Google keeps making mega announcements in the country to rave reviews, Facebook tripped up and fell flat on its face.

Google started free wifi services at about two dozen train stations in the country last year, and has 2 million people using the service each month. CEO Sundar Pichai started off 2017 with a trip to India, and a host of announcements directed at India’s small and medium sized businesses. 51 million of them, to be precise.

See: 5 ways Facebook is going all-out to win over India

The event was carefully co-ordinated to sing with the government’s “Digital India” message, as well as the current demonetisation effects sweeping the country, forcing entrepreneurs, as well as government officials to look at better digitial implementations for their businesses.

51 million businesses

On Wednesday, Pichai told media in New Delhi that Google would train 51 million small businesses to go digital. He then walked the attendees through Primer – a free mobile app designed to teach digital marketing skills. Primer lets anyone learn new marketing skills with short, bite-sized lessons. The app also works offline.

The Primer app is available on the Google Play Store and App Store in English, and Hindi with Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi versions coming shortly, the company said.

Photo credit: tpabma / 123RF.

Wooing them