AdExchanger
“There’s a fallacy that exists among many executives in the US that Asia is one block,” said Chetan Kulkarni, CEO of Bangalore-based digital CRM company Vizury. “But it’s actually a complex mix of very different countries that behave in very different ways.”
Take India and China, for example. The population of each is formidable. Based on local census data, China’s population is expected to hit about 1.37 billion by mid-2015, while India is on schedule to clock in at 1.3 billion.
But that’s really where the similarity ends.
“India is about three to four years behind where China is,” said Dippak Khurana, CEO and co-founder of Vserv, a mobile marketing platform focused on emerging markets, including India, Africa and Southeast Asia.
According to Forrester, smartphone penetration in China and India this year is slated to reach 44% and 23%, respectively. But IDC says that India is really the market to watch – the rate of adoption is happening at a greater speed there than anywhere else in APAC.
“There are about 140 million smartphones in India now out of a base of roughly 900 million connected people,” Khurana said. “Most of the smartphone growth in the world is going to be in India in the near term. India is an inflection point.”
In other words, the smartphone potential among the current Internet-connected population of India is more than twice the size of the entire population of the US.
But it’s not just India and China that are worlds apart in terms of consumer behavior.
“Mobile engagement doesn’t vary by client – it varies by market,” Kulkarni said. “Digital media is global. Consumer behavior and data is local.”
