India is the most strategic and critical market for Facebook and the country will push the company's goal to connect the next one billion people, Umang Bedi, Facebook's managing director, India and South Asia told reporters at an event in New Delhi on Wednesday.
"The next billion that come on mobile, 70 per cent is coming from Asia, which is 700 million, of that 337 million are coming from India," Bedi said.
Facebook also revealed its latest numbers for India during the event. According to the social networking site, as of Q3 Facebook India has 166 monthly active users (MAU) and 85 million daily active (DAU). While on mobile it had 159 million MAUs and 81 million DAUs in India.
Recently, the company had disclosed India is now the top market for WhatsApp with 160 million monthly active users.
"Our vision for business in India is to be loved and become a trusted brand, to be deeply integrated into the fabric and to provide the experiences which are relevant and valuable to all people who are on our platform, including partners," Bedi told the reporters during the event.
The company also informed that India has one of the highest percentages of people accessing Facebook monthly, on mobile (95 per cent for both monthly and daily) in APAC and that India is the largest country for developers building with Facebook outside the US.
Bedi also said that the biggest challenge in making the Internet relevant locally in Asia including India is local content, local languages, local awareness. "We have to move beyond English as a language to make content locally relevant," he said.