‘Make apps in India’ may be a better value proposition

Mobiles will drive the next surge of India’s growth and innovation in the online domain as more people take to the Internet, say India’s e-commerce honchos.

“Nobody saw the mobile becoming so big two years ago. Today, 50 per cent of the transactions on our site are through mobile devices, from just 5 per cent 12 months ago. Online transactions from desktops will decline and mobiles will dominate in almost everything from transactions to visitors and Web traffic,” said Sachin Bansal, founder CEO of Flipkart, at the 10{+t}{+h} edition of the Global Mobile Internet Conference held here.

According to a recent survey by Flipkart, over 50 per cent of the respondents had never accessed the Internet through desktops or laptops.

Referring to the Prime Minister’s ‘Make in India’ campaign and in the context of making mobile technology products in India, Bansal said a ‘Make apps in India’ campaign would generate more value for the country.

“If we get it right, we can become the world leader in mobile apps.”

Agreeing with Bansal, Naveen Tewari, founder CEO of InMobi, said the need of the hour is to set up mobile app villages or cities to build mobile apps for the country. “While the world is in phase 2.0 of mobile apps, we in India are at phase 1.0. We are good at doing things, but we need to be good at solving things too. To do this, we need to have design capability, which we may have to import as our design capability is low-end,” he said.

Stating that the country’s challenges over the next five years can be solved through technology products, Tewari said: “We can either make those software technology products ourselves or import them at $500 billion five years hence. We need to create software products for enterprise, entertainment, education, healthcare, sports and so on, else be prepared to incur a hefty import bill,” ” said Tewari.

Globally, 30 per cent of media consumption happens on mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets and laptops, whereas in India 50-60 per cent happens on smartphones alone.

“Over one billion smartphones will be sold in India over the next five years as against 40-50 million laptops. Today, mobile devices are very powerful, where devices priced at ₹6,000-7,000 are better than the iPhone 3,” said Bansal.

On being queried about how he will compete with Amazon in India, he said: “We can compete much better as we are a ‘mobile first’ market as against those that come from a desktop plus mobile market.”