Facebook sets eye on India

Mark Zuckerberg is determined to converge all his platforms - Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram - for a unified experience for billions of users and India, which is the largest market for some of its services, including WhatsApp, is going to play a critical role in the success of the social networking giant’s new monetisation mission.

According to the company, more than 2.1 billion people now use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger (its ‘Family’ of services) every day on average, and more than 2.7 billion people use at least one of its ‘Family’ of services each month. In India, Facebook has over 300 million users, WhatsApp another 400 million and Instagram over 70 million (millennials are the largest user group).

About one-fourth of WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users are in India. It is, therefore, no surprise, that Facebook chose the Indian market to test-run its digital payment service, before rolling out similar experiments in other countries.

After about one and a half years of test run, WhatsApp is now close to launch its Pay service later this year which could dominate the payment economy, given the fact that almost every Indian who has a smartphone or a Jio phone seems to have taken a liking for WhatsApp despite all the flak it received for its failure to effectively contain the spread of fake news.

An integrated messaging ecosystem plus a payment service may open the doors for various other services, including shopping, for Facebook in India in the near future.

Zuckerberg knows it well that it cannot get the next billion users if it ignores India, where more than half a billion people are yet to go online. A challenge would be to retain the people who are already in its network, especial in view of the growing popularity of the Chinese short videosharing app TikTok in India.