Facebook: India to be Number 1 User-Base Soon, With Booming Mobile Usage

Facebook’s VP for mobile, Vaughan Smith, has expressed his great confidence in India, saying that the country will likely rise to be Facebook’s number one user-base in the coming years. He added:

Currently, it is at number three in terms of number of users. Last announced number was 30 million for India and 45 million for Indonesia. I’m sure India will be number one in the coming years.

We recently looked at an infographic detailing all the Facebook-luvin’ nations in Asia and saw that the Asia-Pacific region has 26 percent of the world’s users of the biggest social network. Of course, that too has the potential to surpass the US to be number one.

Focusing on India seems like a wise strategy, as more of India’s huge populace gets online and gets into social networking. Facebook, for its part, has been clued into this for some time already, having launched its ‘Facebook for every phone’ initiative earlier this year, to ensure that its SNS works on over 2,000 kinds of feature phones. That’s especially important in nations – like India and the Philippines – where so many people use cheaper phones and 2G/GPRS – or, indeed, SMS – to post status updates and photos.

Vaughan Smith said of these shifting trends:

We expect that majority of people in India who have phones would use Facebook as the most important thing on their phone, because that’s what we see in other markets. Which means we will have more Facebook users in India than we do in America.

More than twice as many people login to Facebook from mobiles than desktops, globally. Usage is switching and the same is happening in India.

Bringing Facebook to Indian Feature-Phones

Also this week, Facebook announced a partnership with Taiwanese chip-maker MediaTek (TPE:2454) to embed a tiny Facebook app on the company’s MRE mobile platform. That, in turn, will make its way onto upcoming feature-phones to be sold by Indian telcos Spice Mobility (BOM:517214), and Micromax.

In addition, Facebook already has offices in Hyderabad, and has hired a public policy executive for the country, to try ensure it’s making the right moves in India.

[Source: Dawn]