IF YOU ARE A DIGITAL FIRM with global ambitions, hurry up and figure out your India strategy, if you haven’t already. Or risk losing access to one of the world’s most attractive digital markets.
At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg struck a deal to invest US$5.7 billion for a 9.99 per cent stake in Reliance Jio, the three-year-old telecom company owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. It was Facebook’s biggest deal since acquiring WhatsApp in 2014. Reliance Jio was barely profitable, yet the announcement boosted Facebook’s valuation on Wall Street by eight per cent, or $40 billion. Why?
Because India is a strategic market for digital firms. Facebook is already the most popular social network in the country; WhatsApp has five times as many users in India as in the U.S. (390 million vs. 75 million), and the country is ’s most important market outside the U.S. But Facebook wants to do even more in India. For
