Google’s investment of $10 Billion (₹75,000 Crore) in India
Intro:
Hello viewers!
I am writing this article to share with you my views on the above announcement by Google on its investment in India and put forth some points, which would help you see a more holistic picture.
At the outset, I am happy to share that the first tranche of about ₹ 33.7k crore ($4.5 Billion) which is about 45% of the total $10 Billion is already announced by Google as a strategic partnership with Jio.
This will surely help in technology transfer (very critical right now) and accelerate technological development.
Quote “
The Google-Jio partnership will expand digitization across the length and breadth of India, beyond the current 500 million-plus internet users in the country. Jio Platforms and Google have also entered into a commercial agreement to jointly develop an entry-level affordable smartphone with optimizations to the Android operating system and the Play Store.
“
Read more HERE
My View:
Though, personally I do want to see more investment going to medical devices development / healthcare/ R&D in Tech which India lacks currently, besides the usual product software development. This is much needed in current environment.
Case in point:
Reliance has recently created a world class multi-specialty hospital at Mumbai (Seven hills hospital — Mumbai’s first COVID-19 hospital), and hopefully Reliance will use — at least some part — of Google’s investment to focus more on providing healthcare related services & healthcare software development.
More information HERE:
Digitization in India will help Google much more -Some Points:
1. Increase in ad spending by this digitization process will directly increase Google’s India Advertising revenue multi fold.
2. Increase in digital payments, thereby helping increase revenue and profitability for Google Pay (aka G Pay), Google’s payment arm.
3. Google will also be able to leverage location data to use for its own product, neighbourly to drive up the payment using Google Pay. (Update: According to Google, Neighbourly is going to close down soon, but it still has collected data and would do so till October 2020).
4. Increase in smartphone penetration, will drive up Android / Google Play Store apps usage among children/kids thereby creating additional demographic base for Google.
5. This new revenue engine, will also drive revenue for YouTube, as most of the younger generation seem to be content consumers, rather than content creators. That could be a strong reason why Google carved out a separate product: YouTube Kids.
6. Google also has launched products like YouTube Premium/ YouTube Music, which will drive up the subscription revenue in future, as and when people get addicted to video content and start paying for things which used to be free! (Think about this :) )
7. Increase in digitization, again, will lead to exponential rise in searches on Google Chrome browser as well, this time most of it coming from the rural India, as opposed to urban centers.
8. Increase in smartphone adoption, will create an online marketplace, where local physical shops will have their online presence. This digital marketplace will be controlled/owned, at least partially if not fully, by Google, much like what we already have as Alibaba stores, which means most of the shops will pay more advertising to get a competitive advantage.
I can also add the similar for points for “Files- by Google” and “Google Drive”.
Although I could add more such points here, but I am sure I have put the message across. No private organisation, would want to lose out on the resources and demographic dividend on India (especially rural India) and not generate profit at the end of the day!
There are enough products out there using which, Google can generate loads of revenue/profit from India in the long term.
Please check the list of products page and be amazed at the scale, size and diversity of the google ecosystem. I know I was.
List of Google Products: Wikipedia
Note:
Please search and verify products/information using search engines, like DuckDuckGo or Bing etc. There is no point in looking for sand in a desert, you will always get more than you ask for! :)
Conclusion:
Though I am indeed happy and proud, that Google has chosen India for its huge investment, we should also not take things on a plate and always be ready with rational queries to understand the investments better.
Hence, we, as Indians, should collectively do the following:
Data Localisation:
Request Google and Jio (Reliance) to setup data centers in India for India specific consumer data. This would create a large number of jobs locally and open up alternate economic ecosystem around the data center location.
Sector Specific details:
Request Google to specify sectors, if not particular companies, in the public domain, where the remaining $5.5 Billion (55%) would be invested in.
Thanks for reading this article. This has taken some effort and some support would make it an effort worthwhile :)
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
