December 21, 2012
By V. Ganesh
With increasing competition from Google and social media sites such as Facebook, Yahoo! has found it necessary to revamp its email and instant messenger services.
As part of this upgrade, Yahoo! will offer the same experience of using an email on desktops, mobile phones and tablet computers, which was not the case with its previous versions. Yahoo! mail will be offered as an app and will be available on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and Surface tablets. Apart from India, Yahoo! announced this revamped version of email in other markets such as the US and Taiwan earlier this month.
“India has around 100 million Internet users in a population of 1.2 billion people and there is still significant room to grow,” said Vivek Sharma, General Manager – Mail and Messenger for Yahoo!. The company does not give out country-specific email numbers but globally has around 310 million email users, according to ComScore data.
In India, social networking has reached 95% of the total online user base, compared to 82% of the world’s online users, according to ComScore. Three out of four minutes spent on a social network are on Facebook.
In contrast, use of email and instant messaging is on the decline, especially in the younger age groups with email usage declining by 22% in the 15-24 age segment and by 8% among 25-34 year olds. But Yahoo! is willing to bet on the growth of email citing that it is seeing a 200% growth this year over the previous year. With only 1.2 billion of the world’s population using email, that still leaves more than five billion people who are not email users.
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