Face of Facebook in India

                         Face of Facebook In India      

Mark Zuckerberg arrived in India today, and will also meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow. Zuckerberg is in India to address the first Internet.org summit taking place on October 9-10 in the city. The young billionaire is expected to meet members of other key ministries as well.

Zuckerberg is the third high profile CEO of a US-based corporation, after Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Micrsoft's Satya Nadella, to visit India in last few days.

'Internet.Org' aims to make Internet access affordable for people across the globe. Focused on enabling the next five billion people without Internet access to come online, the founding members of the project include Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.

The partners are collaborating on developing lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones and deploying Internet access in under-served communities.

The Internet.org summit will bring together experts, officials and industry leaders to focus on ways to deliver more Internet services for people in languages other than English.

Zuckerberg will also meet Modi to talk about how Facebook and the Indian government can collaborate on Internet.org. In July, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sandberg visited India. She had met Modi, who has effectively used social networking during his election campaign and later even in governance.

When Modi met Sandberg, he had suggested the use of Facebook for improving governance, better interaction between people and the government, and to attract more tourists to India. India is an important market for the social networking company. With over one billion users globally, the company gets over 100 million users from India. Many of these users log onto the website from their mobile devices.

According to research firm eMarketer, the number of users in India will touch 108.9 million by the end of the year as compared to 77.8 million in 2013.Meeting PM Narendra Modi and other diplomats will be at the top of Mark’s list but there are other things that might fit into his itinerary to India.

1. Mark’s push for Internet.org in India

The other big reason for Mark’s visit to India is also about accelerating the push for his dream project, Internet.org. According to sources he will speak at the Facebook-promoted Internet.org’s Content and Usability Summit, which is being held in Delhi. The summit aims to focus on accelerating the creation and consumption of locally relevant content and value-added services in India.In fact during the recent acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion, Mark had shared that he wants the app to be the dial tone of the Internet. He also informed that the messaging app at some point will fuel the ambitions of the Internet.org project. His latest meeting with Mexico’s President Peña Nieto also focused around ways to work together on Internet.org to make affordable internet access available to everyone in Mexico. This would also be one of the core issues to be discussed when he meets Modi in the next few days

2. Joining hands with Swach Bharat or Clean India Campaign

During this trip, the present Indian government will propose Facebook to partner for the recently launched ‘Swach Bharat’ or ‘Clean India’ campaign. However, there isn’t any confirmation from Facebook on this alliance.

Launched on 2nd October, Swach Bharat campaign or Clean India is one of PM Modi’s prized projects. Faintly inspired by the recent viral campaign “Ice Bucket Challenge” , the PM has nominated nine celebrities including cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, industrialist Anil Ambani and several actors to spread awareness on cleanliness and make ‘Swachh Bharat’ a people’s movement.

3. Strengthening the business confidence in India for Facebook 

India is a big market for Facebook and it isn’t saturating like the developed markets such as US and Canada. Back in the first quarter Facebook shared that India crossed 100 million active users — the second country, after the United States. Out of which 84 million access the social networking site from their mobile devices.

It is a known fact that India is a big market for the social networking giant which is one of the most popular social networking site in the country. However, business wise Facebook is still struggling to build an environment like it has in developed countries.

Earlier this year, Facebook reported that in India it has witnessed a 63% rise in profits during the 2013 financial year. Facebook India reported profit after tax of about Rs 9.6 crore for the year ended March 2013, compared with Rs 5.9 crore the previous year.

While Facebook’s profit might be increasing on papers, it was reported by NBW that the revenue contribution by India is negligible (0.29%) even though it drives more than 8.2% of Facebook’s user base.

Facebook is well aware of the challenges in a market like India which has a very low internet penetration rate and is still ruled by feature phones. To increase revenue shares Facebook has been working on an ad product built around the missed call feature. So this trip could be also gaining more business confidence from the market, just as Sheryl’s did in her India trip.

4. Stronger ties with the government

Setting up local servers in the country by social networking giants has been a hanging issue from the last few years. The issue comes into focus whenever the country witnesses any communal clashes. We saw this happening during the recent riots in Pune, reported to have its roots in social media.

The present government had recently assured the Supreme Court that due to a spurt in online child abuse and sex crimes linked to pornography it will ask social networking sites – including Facebook, Google and Twitter to have servers in India so that authorities can keep tabs on objectionable content. While there is an ongoing debate on the same, Facebook wouldn’t like to set up servers as of now so having a stronger tie with the present government which is digitally inclined wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Again this trip wouldn’t be a bad one for Mark to raise a toast with the telecom giants in the country and work out a way on how both can work together with the changing times.

Definitely it is a very important trip for Mark Zuckerberg and for India.