In the world of global commerce, India is uniformly seen as a waking giant. With the world’s single largest population – and one that accounts for over 17% of the world population – trending markets and product sectors in the nation can have a decisive impact on global trends.
At present, most analysts suggest that we’ve yet to see the impact of this spending power in action, as India continues its decades long process of ‘levelling up’ and welcoming more and more citizens to the modern international workforce.
It’s also noteworthy that while India mirrors the rest of the globe in terms of broad tech trends, there are some meaningful differences reflected by its specific cultural context, and material factors such as its deep manufacturing base.
If one were to take the pulse of India today, what would one find to be its fastest growing markets in tech? While such a multifaceted question leads to a range of answers depending on how data can be interpreted, the following markets have shown strong and consistent growth of the past decade at least, and with no sign of slowing.
Mobile Optimised Gaming
Games are big business, both in India and beyond. In fact, gaming in 2024 is the single largest entertainment sector on earth, generating around $300bn in revenues every year. Of this, the fastest growing and most influential market is that of smartphone gaming, which accounts for over 50% of all revenues.
In regions such as the Indian subcontinent, gamers are 1.5 times more likely to use a smartphone as their sole or primary gaming device, reflecting the later adoption of computing devices in much of the world – a trend catalyzed by the relative affordability of smartphones over traditional desktop PCs and Laptops.
Accordingly, this is a strong growth area in India straddling a diverse range of categories. For example, while real money gaming must contend with close regulation in many Indian states, it still has come to represent a significant growth edge for the gaming industry here. This is in no small part down to the growing popularity of dedicated platforms like Vegasslotsonline IN which collates leading gaming providers by region for easy access and discoverability. Furthermore, such platforms play a significant part in boosting the sector’s organic reach due to serving as directories for competitive welcome offers and other sign-up deals that facilitate greater digital footfall for this burgeoning industry.
More broadly, gaming in India is on the up – particularly in the wake of the rise of esports and competitive gaming. One glowing example of this is BGMI – Battlegrounds Mobile India, the PUBG variant optimized for the domestic audience. It enjoys as many as 15 million daily players from across India. This has led to the government investing in esports infrastructure and training camps, further validating the increasingly central role of this new market.
Artificial Intelligence
Eager to get a head start on an AI-centric future, the country is witnessing a boom in start-ups and products integrating AI into its next generation offerings. To further facilitate this process, the government recently held the first INDIAai summit, a global AI conference held in collaboration with academia and the tech industry.
India knows full well how vital for the future computing and tech endeavors this disruptive new modality is, and is looking to not only get in on the ground floor of this new revolution – but through the efforts of the likes of INDIAai, even become an early hotspot for innovation and discussion of its potentials.
Sports Infrastructure
Sports broadcasting in India has occasionally been held back in the past by a number of factors. Inconsistent internet speeds across regions have limited the widespread adoption of video streaming services, and until recently India’s most popular sport – Cricket – remained stubbornly unsuited to mainstream consumption due to its herculean test match format.
All of that looks to be rapidly changing today though, following the rise of the IPL’s T20 league. Created in the final years of the first decade of the millennium, this ushered in a new franchise model with teams centered on most major cities in India. It also cut down the multi-day event of test cricket to a digestible 90 minute experience.
This has woken the subcontinent’s appetite for sports broadcasting, and when the IPL T20 landed an international broadcast rights deal to the sum of $6.2bn back in 2021, it became the second most valuable sport in the word behind the NFL, virtually overnight.
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