In her annual state of the tech industry report, Mary Meeker devoted an entire section to the growth and promise of the Indian market.
In the presentation, Meeker described India as “one of the most fascinating markets for the internet on the planet.”
India is one of the few places where global internet growth is not slowing, increasing by 28% in 2016 to 355m users, up from 277m in 2015.
And with a population of 1.3bn, this is still only a 27% rate of internet penetration.
Dedicating 55 pages of the 355 page report to India, the Kleiner Perkins partner also revealed that Indian users spent the longest time on Android devices last year, apart from consumers in China.
Indian internet users spent almost 150bn hours on Android devices last year, the report stated, compared to around 70bn hours in 2014.
In addition to this, last year India just pipped the USA by becoming the biggest downloader of apps from the Google Play Store, with over 6.2bn total downloads.
Part of this has been helped by falling smartphone prices – the average selling price falling from around $260 in 2007 to $140 in 2016, or from 26% of per capital GDP to 8%.
With this, the price of wireless in India is also falling, dropping by just under 50% in the last year alone.
The market has also seen a dramatic increase in the amount of wireless internet data used – figures rising by 9x year over year.
Meeker’s report comes off the back of interest in the Indian market from online dating companies – TrulyMadly CEO Sachin Bhatia this week calling India the “final frontier” for online dating growth.
This follows moves into the market by Happn and Tinder, as well as Google’s 2016 Year in Search report, which revealed that there had been a big increase in online dating-related searches in India throughout 2016 – dating-related searches growing by 50%, and dating app downloads growing by 53%.
Read more here, and check out Meeker’s full report below.