India-born chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai said the country’s digital economy must reach its potential for local Internet companies to be competitive.
“We get excited about smartphones, but we’re talking about 300 million in a country of 1.3 billion people, and not all of them have good connectivity. As a company that’s getting built here, it’s difficult to scale across India and reach that full potential, which gives you the resources to go compete internationally,” Pichai said in a fireside chat at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, on Thursday.
Local Internet companies such as Ola and Flipkart are struggling to raise capital to compete against international rivals Uber and Amazon, respectively. Ola and Flipkart are facing mounting losses because their global rivals are deploying funds from their international earnings.
“Hopefully Indian companies are more thoughtful when they build stuff, targeting similar areas like Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand. Those markets are developed and the same products will work there as well, so they need to set their sights a little higher,” said Pichai. “I am pretty convinced that in a 5-10 year timeline there will be big global technology companies coming out of India,” he added.
Pichai said an affordable smartphone of $30 would help more rural Indians come online. According to Google, the 200 mn smartphones in India now are expected to increase to 500 mn by 2020. The technology major is also banking upon public private partnerships like the RailTel project to drive Internet penetration in the country.
While the institute’s students gave Pichai, who graduated from IIT-Kharagpur in 1993, a rockstar welcome, Pichai told them to chase their own dreams. “Setbacks don’t matter. It is important to keep your dreams and follow them,” he said. “I had my share of experiences (in college), which everyone goes through,” he said in response to a question. After an “embarrassed first year” at college, he made up for it in the following two years, Pichai added. Pichai appeared for an interview with Google on April Fool’s day in 2004. “Google had just launched Gmail and asked me what I thought about it,” he recollected. Although Pichai had a fun-filled interaction, he made it clear that he held a tough job. “How can I replace you at Google?” a student asked him. “Be careful what you wish for,” he replied.
[Source:-Business Standard]
