NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

By Rahul Sachitanand, G Seetharaman

Two battling technology giants are preparing for a war. The weapons are largely intangible but the prize is tangibly lucrative. The trophy: you.

Google and Amazon have intensified their focus on India, an ecommerce frontier that has the greatest potential for now. China, the other great market, has not welcomed the American companies warmly: Google had to quit the Chinese market in 2010, and Amazon has under 1% share there. Unfriendly policies and homegrown behemoths have made it difficult to breach Beijing. The US, the home market, is saturated. India, on the other hand, is inviting. It will have half a billion mobile internet users by June, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India, and more than a billion phones will be sold by 2030, says Nielsen. There’s plenty of space for multiple battlefronts here, and that is what both are doing.

Photo courtesy of Meena Kadri.