Mary Meeker’s focus on India: The key highlights

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker included a special focus on India’s fast-growing technology sector during her annual trends report today at Code Conference.

Here’s what she had to say about India, one of the “most fascinating markets for the internet on the planet.”

While globally internet growth is slowing, that’s not the case in India. Internet user numbers grew more than 28 percent in 2016 (mid-year figures) to 355 million users, second only to China. At 27 percent internet penetration, there’s a lot of room for growth.

Excluding China, Indian users spend the most time on Android devices. People in India spent nearly 150 billion hours on Android devices in 2016. They’ve also become the biggest downloaders of Google Play apps.

India wireless data prices are still relatively high but they’re falling fast, down about 50 percent over the last year.

Cheaper wireless data encourages greater smartphone ownership and has caused data consumption to jump 9X year over year.

India is an incredibly fierce battleground right now for hardware and software companies. Take a look at the market share shifts, with Chinese hardware vendors on the rise:

E-commerce in India is also growing, bulwarked by the rise of mobile payment transactions. Monthly digital payment volume via the government’s Universal Payments Interface grew to $359 million this year.

Much more in Meeker’s entire presentation.

Post updated to say wireless data consumed increased by 9X not 9 percent.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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