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Google says it will help two lakh more small and medium businesses (SMBs) get an online presence by the end of next year to take total to five lakh.
The search engine company, which launched the SMB drive in late 2011, said it could reach out to three lakh firms in the last two years.
“Of the 4.8 crore SMBs in the country, only five per cent have some web presence. About 80 lakh people can immediately come on board,” K Suryanarayana, Head of Google India (Small Medium Business), said.
Rising Internet users The number of Internet users in the country has gone up to 20 crore from 15 crore a year ago. There were several examples where very small businesses that benefited because of their web presence. “They need to have presence on the web in order to get found and get business,” he said.
“The cost of doing business over the web is far less and small businesses are realising this by the day,” the Google official said. Though the company helps SMBs get an online presence, it is their responsibility to find third party services to host the website after the free runs gets over.
“We have found that 30 per cent of them renewed,” he said.
“We offer free phone support, chat and email services in local languages for SMB customers. The Internet economy in India is set to take off and for the Internet users to have more meaningful and useful experience of the Internet, we need to get more local businesses online,” Allan Thygesen, Vice-President and Global Head of SMBs of Google, said.
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