Social networking major Facebook is likely to adopt a different strategy for increasing its presence in the Indian market considering the mismatch between the population and the internet penetration.
The company, instead of eyeing the web users alone, would look at the mobile users.
Currently, the company has about 15 million active users in India while it has about 500 million users globally.
"In India, we are focusing on bringing the users onto the platform. There are a billion people and 600 million mobile phones. We have a long way to go. In India, people have more mobile experience than the web experience. We have been working with several mobile handset makers to provide some compelling applications for our platform. We are working with almost all the operators including Aircel, Airtel, Idea, etc," Meenal Balar, international marketing manager, Facebook Global, said.
Facebook on Thursday opened its first Asian centre in Hyderabad.
The company currently has operations in three locations globally and the Hyderabad facility is the only one the company plans to have in India for now.
"Facebook Hyderabad will focus on building online operations, supporting users, advertisers and developers around the world. The team here will work with the users, advertisers and developers. The users' questions and those of the developers will be handled by the teams here. For advertisers too, the teams will answer all the questions on making use of the platform in their advertisement campaign," Don Foul, director of global online operations, said.
The Hyderabad centre is part of the company's strategy to grow beyond the US market, with about 70% of its users located outside that country.
The company also claimed that the number of users in India has doubled in the last six months.
"We have hundreds of thousands of advertisers working on connecting with people. The developers are working on the payment service opportunity as well. From the India point of view, it is going to be a great platform for all the users and Indian developers will be working on creating experiences for the users here," Foul said. Facebook would encourage the advertisers to carry out their campaigns by having advertising specific pages to connect with people on the social site.
Company officials, however, refused to divulge the revenue figures and also the number of people that would be hired in Hyderabad.
k_ramana@dnaindia.net |
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