India key market for global internet companies: Morgan Stanley

New Delhi: India has emerged as a key market for some of the global Net companies even though it is yet to make the cut to the top league in terms of revenue contributions, says a study by Morgan Stanley.

The top investment banker reached the conclusion based on app downloads in India over the past 12 months for the offerings from these global internet giants. The study also says the country has quite a few commonalities with Brazil.

"WhatsApp had 55 million downloads in India in the past 12 months, making it the Number 1 country with a 35-percent market share," says the study. "WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the largest instant messaging services in India followed by Hike."

The study says India also ranks among the top three markets in terms of app download for internet companies such as Amazon, Uber, Candy Crush, LinkedIn and Facebook.

"US accounted for the largest share for all these companies. India or Brazil filled in the Number 2 position for each of them," the study says. "We were surprised by the fact that Twitter ranked 5th in India in terms of app downloads."

The top three slots for Twitter were taken by the US, Brazil and Japan.

"We believe tracking the Brazilian internet market closely could raise some interesting insights on the Indian market, as both countries seem to have common traits and are in the same growth cycle," says the study.

But the study finds the monetisation levels to be low in India.

"Interestingly, while India accounted for 13 per cent of the app downloads for Candy Crush, it only accounted for 0.2 per cent of its revenues. On the other hand, while the US accounted for 14.4 per cent of app downloads, it generated 61.4 per cent of revenue for Candy Crush."

India had over one billion subscribers of mobile phone services and 140 million for broadband in both wireless and wireline modes as on January 31 this year.