Yahoo India is putting more thrust on its localisation strategy. The internet content company has announced the availability of its content in seven Indian languages. They are Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi and Gujarati. The company has also announced that its Messenger 8.0 would be available in nine Indian languages - Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati.
With its English language portal in India, Yahoo can only address up to about 30 million users who are comfortable with English, George Zacharias, managing director of Yahoo India, told reporters in Bangalore. India has currently 30 million internet users.
But local language content and applications are needed as the user base expands. Yahoo expects the number of Indian Internet users to zoom to 300-400 million over the next five years if there are applications in the local languages, and Internet access is improved.
As localisation is the way to go, it’s not Yahoo alone going in for local content. Sify is already available in five languages - Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Rediff’s email is available in 11 Indian languages. Rediff also launched its IM service in Hindi called Rediff Bol.
MSN India went local in September last year with the launch of of MSN Hindi , MSN Tamil, MSN Telugu, MSN Kannada and MSN Malayalam.