Creator boom. ‘India punches above its weight for Adobe’

The India business is booming. It is on fire. We can’t disclose numbers, but if APAC (Asia Pacific) is one of the growth engines for Adobe then India is punching above its weight. Last year, India was our fastest growing market. There is no question about how much adoption is going on of our products, not just in enterprise but all the way down into the consumer space. It is not only the function of our move into technology that relates to the personalisation at scale but also a function of the economy and how serious companies in India are getting around all things digital.

I don’t have any numbers. But it is obvious to me that private-public partnerships are working well in India. There is clearly an appetite for foreign investment and, more than that, there seems to be strong consumer confidence and sentiment. And wherever you have that you generally see an innovation drive in corporates.

Between 2019 and 2022, in our emerging markets business, we had 200 million new mobile internet subscribers. A large proportion of that came from India. So you have people now accessing the internet in a social mobile environment and accessing payments. And that is fuelling the drive on personalisation at scale. Every company we talk to is deliberate about accelerating their digital ambitions and making sure they are in a position to acquire new customers.

This tier-two towns and provinces growth is not specific to India. What we have seen is a boom in the creator economy with people becoming ‘solopreneurs’, creating rich engaging content. You have to think of the content supply chain as having two bookends. On one bookend you have an acceleration of content creation. Because content is the proxy for any degree of personalisation of scale for any business. India is playing its part in the net new addition to the content economy. These are people joining the creator economy for the first time.

The other bookend is the other end of the content chain, which is retargeting and monetisation of first-party data, which is critical for any company as you have to deal with the customer as an individual.

The best way to think of India’s participation in our growth is that it is contributing to both ends of the content supply chain simultaneously. You have a boom in content creators and a boom in B2B and B2C companies serious about acquiring and retaining customers, and monetising those customers — not in a creepy way, but by using first-party consensual data. Whether you are a banking company or insurance company you have rich first-party data that you can monetise. I see that playing out in India far more than any (other) geography.

We see Firefly as an enormous value addition to our creative community. It democratises that part of the creative work that is labour-intensive. The technology is absolutely fantastic. While others in the space have gone the text-based route, our slant is 100 per cent video- and image-based.

My view is that our business needs to follow the broader macroeconomic and geopolitical things going on in the world. Adobe in Asia Pacific is in that way there, of always being physically responsible in terms of matching our capacity plans with finance plans. We have been very deliberate and made sure we have laid some bets in priority areas and priority geography, India being one of those. Whilst we are not immune, we don’t belong in that cache of broader tech industry either.