Truecaller Goes on World Tour – First Stop India

Truecaller is a global mobile phonebook and since we are used all over the world, we have insight into the mobile industry all over the world. Over the next six weeks, we will be taking you on a tour of some of the globe?s most interesting mobile markets. This week, we start with India.

Truecaller In India By The Numbers:

+500.000 number searches per day
+640.000 numbers of spam numbers are reported to Truecaller?s Call Filter
Losing one?s mobile phone is a scary thought for most people. It?s not just a loss of an apparatus that is scary, but also being deprived of potentially crucial information with regard to both one?s personal life and work. Plus it?s a loss of a vital tool for everyday communication. In India, this fear of losing a mobile phone is well founded.

Surveys have concluded that half of all Indian mobile users have been victims of loss or theft of their mobile phone. In a fast-growing mobile market like India, where several million new numbers are added each month and many of these phones end up stolen, it is close to impossible for conventional number directories to be up to date, especially because most users have prepaid subscriptions that is not accessible in any official listings. It can be chaos and is only growing worse.

Rajiv, a 41-year-old businessman from Mumbai told us, ?in just little over two weeks, I?ve received ten calls from one of my company subtractors, each time from a new unique number. It?s really hard keeping up with his pace of changing numbers!?

Speaking of changing numbers, here are some more facts about India:

Indian mobile subscribers expected to surpass 1 billion very soon.
The amount of telephone subscriptions is growing at an enormous pace, with a monthly addition of approximately 20 million numbers!
Over the last couple of years, wireless has overtaken wirelines. The share of wireless phones has increased from 46.54% in 2004 to 95.54% in December, 2011.
That?s a whole lot of phones to keep track of. Truecaller can help, thanks to its user-generated database. Truecaller provides the most accurate search function among any available apps in India. Since the accessibility of telecommunication is rapidly growing and will continue to increase in India, especially in rural sectors (to put it in perspective, more households have mobile phones than have indoor toilets), Truecaller is a powerful tool to keep up.

Another problem for the Indian mobile market is spam. It is estimated that about 100 million spam text messages are sent every single day in the mobile systems in India, which is a lot of cost, a lot of wasted time and wasted storage. Truecallers helps users instantly identify potentially harmful and intrusive sales numbers in their everyday phone traffic via our spam filter.

All together, the biggest challenges in the Indian mobile market are challenges of size and a lack of consistency. Numbers are always changing while the amount of users is growing. Mobile users need something to help them keep up and organize the chaos. Truecaller is here to help.