Google recently announced its plans to invest 10 billion dollars in India over the next 5-7 years. This comes as the search giant looks to accelerate the adoption of digitization and the use of digital services in important overseas markets like India.
The chief executive officer of Google, Sundar Pichai, recently unveiled the Google for India Digitization Fund through which the company will be making regular investments in India.
“We’ll do this through a mix of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure and ecosystem investments. This is a reflection of our confidence in the future of India and its digital economy, ” Pichai said via video conference at Google’s annual event focused on India.
The investments will be concentrated in the following four areas:
- Enabling information and affordable access to it for every Indian in their own language whether it is Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or any other.
- Developing products and services that are very specific to India’s unique needs.
- Empowering businesses and to encourage them to embrace digital transformation.
- Leverage technology and Artificial Intelligence in areas like medicine, agriculture, health etc for social good.
India is a very important market for Google as its products have reached and are being used by almost the entire population. The country with a population of 1.3 billion is one of the world’s most untapped markets for American and Chinese tech giants.
India has over 500 million people that are online today and over 450 million smartphones are actively used in the country. With such a huge potential, tech giants don’t want to miss reaching these people with their products and services.
Google dominates the Indian market with its search, emails and videos permeating every phone and desktop. Even though this is the case, Google, like all other tech giants only makes a fraction of its revenue from India.
“There’s still more work to do in order to make the internet affordable and useful for a billion Indians, from improving voice input and computing for all of India’s languages, to inspiring and supporting a whole new generation of entrepreneurs, ” said Pichai.
Google’s latest announcement comes at a crucial time when India is retaliating against Chinese firms. On the basis of this, it has become even more important for American tech firms to gain a strong foothold in India.
We have to wait and see how the $10 billion is going to unfold in the world’s largest internet market. What are your thoughts about it? Let us know below!
