Facebook’s recent efforts at cornering the social networking market in India seem to have paid off as the company announced that it had reached 100 million users in India on Wednesday. This means India has the second highest number of active users after the United States.
This is a big achievement as Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) only opened its first office in India four years ago when the country had a very modest number of active users totaling around 8 million. Since then it has made a deal with Airtel, the country’s biggest cellphone provider, to give pre-paid users unlimited free use of the network in all nine of India’s regional languages. Facebook has also invested in Little Eyes Lab, an Indian start-up that does performance analysis and creates monitoring tools for the memory and power consumption of applications on mobile devices.
Smartphones are a huge growth sector in India due to the constant increases in the quality of the cellphone coverage there. With 1.2 billion potential Facebook users in India, this is approximately the same amount as Facebook currently has for active users globally, so 100 million could be relatively insignificant with regard to the number it could end up with there.
This is great news for Facebook as it is actively and aggressively marketing across Asia in order to drive growth as the increases in users in its other markets begins to plateau. With 164 million internet subscribers currently in India the number of Facebook users could surpass the United States within another couple years. India has huge potential as a market for all mobile apps as in 2013 smartphone sales alone grew by over 44 million.
