India becomes Facebook's fastest growing market

Facebook may not have had the smoothest of times in India, but the company is more committed than ever to connect more Indians to the internet. And it should — India is now Facebook’s fastest growing market.

SEE ALSO: Inside Google's plan to conquer India's internet users

Facebook is growing faster in India compared to the average of the rest of the world, said Adam Mosseri, VP, Product Management at Facebook. The social juggernaut says the daily active users in India has grown 22 percent year-on-year compared with 17 percent globally.

Facebook says it has over 155 million monthly active users in India, of which 77 million access the network daily. Most of them, 147 million to be precise, access Facebook from their phones every month and 73 million every day. 

The Facebook executive reiterated the opportunity the company sees in India, and outlined how the company intends to grow in the country. "Our primary focus right now is for the next billion people to come online and India is obviously a huge part of that,” he told Live Mint. 

Tech companies see a big untapped market in India. Though the country is one of the fastest growing markets for internet users, much of it is yet to come online. "We are not sure if even two-third of the [India’s] population is online," he said. 

Internet penetration is increasingly improving in urban Indian cities, but other regions are trailing. Mosseri said Facebook is eyeing growth in tier-II, tier-III, rural areas and places where feature phones are still dominant.

"We care so much about India because it is an important market, and growing at such a fast pace. It is also different from all the markets I have focused on. Networks, language and content fragmentation, are all very different. In some ways, we are focused more on rural areas," he said. 

Over the past few years, Facebook has made its products lighter so that they can be accessed on slower networks. More importantly, the company has also released apps such as Facebook Lite, and Facebook Messenger Lite that offer a stripped-down version of their full-fledged counterpart, but work much efficiently when you’re on a spotty network zone. Naturally, they are quickly becoming popular among people.   

Making its services less network-intensive is of course just one of the things company is doing to rope in more Indians to the internet, and by extension, turn them into Facebook users. The company is also looking into making its products available in more regional languages, Mosseri said. Facebook is currently available in 12 regional languages. As many as 90 percent of Indians can’t speak English. 

But perhaps the company’s biggest bet to get more Indians to the internet is bringing data connectivity to them. Last year, Facebook launched its Free Basics (formerly known as Internet.org) initiative to India. Through this program, the company offered people free internet access to select websites and services. Its "walled-garden approach", however, didn’t sit well with the Indian government, which banned the initiative earlier this year. 

Far from giving up, in August, the company said it’s testing a new program called Express Wi-Fi in several remote areas of India. For this, it will be partnering with state-led RailTel to provide internet services at railway stations and surrounding regions. The company hasn’t shared any development it has made with this, but because it's a tried and tested method, it is unlikely to irk Indians. Google has taken a similar approach to bring free Wi-Fi to railway stations in India, and it's growing quickly.