India Today has a cover story on Wired Generation – dont know whether its humor or satire of India’s most respect editorial team to have claimed “most of India’s 200 million middle class homes now have computers”! And this is a managing editor… not once but twice in the same article!
Now just wait and watch entrepreneurs use this “fact” in their pitches 🙂
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Cybercafes and dead? Urban penetration of PCs is still less than 15% from my experience. Heck, in Bangalore, with an urban population of 7 million, there are less than 300,000 home PCs.
Cyber cafes are the choice for a huge number of people, which is why the Satyam Infoways and the Reliance Webworlds are doing so much business. In fact there are “remote” courses (basically those that involve long distance learning) that enforce testing Reliance Webworlds (including the IIMs!)
Also, the next big thing in cities (and even small towns) nowadays is to use cyber cafes for stock trading. And this is so popular that broker have set up their own terminals for the day traders, becoming vertical versions of cyber cafes. The money is in the brokerage, not in the lending of a computer for a few hours.
But the masses have still not adopted home computing. The masses do not include people who sip coffees at barista or pay Rs. 250 for a movie ticket or eat at restaurants where each dish costs more than Rs. 200. And the masses are more than 90% of our population.
Here’s what I believe is the latest report on where people access the net from. Cybercafes has been going down slowly, but is still the preferred mode.
Isn’t cybercafes dead? who is using cyberafes these days copared to when in 2000.
If you consider urban penetration of PCs, it will be close to 75%, If you look around who doesn’t have PC at home.
There’s a difference between the number of domestic households owning a computer, number that access the Internet, and the number of computer owning households.
Firstly, the number of PCs sold in India was around 4.3 million in 2006 (IDC, http://www.idcindia.com/Press/17feb2006.htm). I would estimate the total base at around 30 million (we were 5 million in 2001) and corporates + cyber cafes to have about 85% of that. About 4 to 4.5 million PCs are in houses, and I think even that is an overstatement. I have three PCs at home. Chances are that the real number of PC owning households is around 3 million.
PCs that have a net connection: I think that figure, on a per household basis,is less than 2 million.
Number that access the net – if you consider the huge number of cyber cafe visitors in comparison to PC owners, I’d say 35-50million people was a fair figure. Note that time based visitors to cyber cafes means there’s very little internet commerce capability, limited to airline tickets or such. Netbanking and Online credit card sales penetration is still fairly low.
There’s a feel good factor, yes. Growth is heady for the top bracket. Penetration is not low because of lack of money; it’s the void in reach and infrastructure. By 2015 India will, at the rate it’s growing, reach around 150 million PCs with about 10 million in households. Still not anywhere close, I think, to the figures touted.
Yeah Alok, that’s what I was pointing out. 200 m households would mean at least 80 per cent of the entire Indian population!
Unlike Net usage, mobile penetration figures seem to be more accurate. 100 million!!! Everyone seems to be in agreement on that number. And unlike Net usage, cell usage is almost always at least once a day.