Google says it will focus on accelerating India’s digital growth

Google says it will focus on accelerating India’s digital growth

Google says it will focus on accelerating India’s digital growth, Google will focus on accelerating growth in India’s digital ecosystem and is “excited about expanding partnerships with a number of partners in the region”, the company said during its first-quarter earnings call.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive of the US-based search giant and its parent, Alphabet, told analysts that its work in India helped in the development and launch of Google Pay globally.

Google Pay, the payments arm of Google, was launched as Tez in September 2017 in India and has a significant portion of its customers in India. Currently, 150 million people in 40 countries are using Google Pay, Pichai said.

Q1 results: On Wednesday, Alphabet posted a 23% year-over-year growth in revenue to $68.01 billion in the quarter ended March 31. Services revenue totalled $61.47 billion, including advertising revenue of $54.66 billion. Cloud revenue was $5.82 billion.

Pichai also acknowledged the debate on Play Store’s policies. “We have made changes to our Google Play pricing model to help all developers on our platform succeed,” he said. “Today, 99% of developers qualify for a service fee of 15% or less. While this impacted our short-term results, we think it’s the right long-term approach to support the ecosystem and to be the most developer friendly App Store and gaming platform available.”