Nami Zarringhalam, co-founder of collaborative mobile phone directory Truecaller, said more than half the Swedish firm’s 50 million users are in India. In conversation with ET, he explained why the curiosity of Indian users is helping his firm create new products.
How important is India market for you?
Mobile operators in markets such as Sweden would have around 1-2 million subscribers but in India, each mobile operator has at least 100 million subscribers. Owing to the sheer market size India has to offer, we had targeted it right from the inception of Truecaller.
We also find Indian users curious and wanting to try out new products and that helps us shape our products. We have been seeing tremendous growth as we are adding 6 lakh users each week in India alone.
What are the reasons for the high demand your product has in India?
In India, out of the 900 million telephone users most are using prepaid numbers which means even the operators do not know who the caller is. Further, one does not have access to robust yellow pages service here in India.
Spam calls, telemarketing calls are unwanted and are on the rise in India and this is one of the prime reasons for which Truecaller has been in demand. We block close to 2 million calls per day for our Indian users. Additionally, the user data is fully encrypted and safe.
What kind of role is India going to play in your growth in future?
Given the untapped space in the tier II markets in India, we see a huge opportunity to multiply our user base. This will contribute directly to our vision of quadrupling our global user base to 200 million by December 2014.
Two-third of the growth would be from major cities backed by increasing penetration of smartphones, rising number of smaller startups, and increase in usage by telecom operators. In addition to that, we see potential in working with a lot of startups in India and being part of the Sequoia team helps bring in synergies.
Further, tie-up with more service providers, in addition to recently announced Tata Docomo and expanding services across OEMs, startups, corporates would further contribute to our overall growth.
