India is expected to reach the magic figure of 500 million phone subscribers by 2010 and the target is quite achievable.

The current subscribers’ base in the country is 150 million including 100 million mobile phone subscribers. The target for 2007, which has already been announced earlier, is 250 million new phone connections. Mobile phone companies added 4.25 million new subscribers to reach the subscriber base of 101.17 million. On the other hand, the fixed line subscriber base shrunk by 0.11 million to finish at 47.40 million.

Rs. 12,000 crore, or $2.6 billion: that is the estimated size of Indian advertising across all media. Online advertising including classifieds is a small chunk of this, only $88 million (Rs. 400 crore), but growing at a rapid pace. Have you started thinking about naukri.com, India’s leading job search portal, which plans to bring its IPO shortly? Actually Jobs-advertisement is one segment where online advertising moved ahead of print ads. While the online job-ads market is estimated at $44.4 million (Rs. 200 crore), print ads for jobs command only a market of $22.2 million (Rs. 100 crore).

Well, don’t even think of comparing these figures with the U.S. advertising market, which is expected to reach $150 billion in 2006.

The overall Personal Computers shipment grew at 30% to cross 4.6 million units, in the year 2005-06. Interestingly, as a trend-reversal, consumer desktops grew at 33% compared to 15% growth in commercial desktops. Total Desktop PCs sales grew 21%, while Notebook PCs shot up by 168%.

The Indian information technology-enabled services (ITeS) industry is poised to touch $10 billion by 2006-07 and $26 billion by 2009-10. Corporates are expected to continue outsourcing many of their labour-intensive business process service tasks to developing countries like India to gain cost savings and quality advantages. The demand growth in the ITeS industry is likely to be export-led, with the domestic market also expected to grow at a rate in excess of 50%. However, lack of good infrastructure is the biggest challenge which the ITeS industry in India is facing.