Open to more tieups with featurephone companies: Caesar Sengupta, Google VP, Next Billion Users

Google is open to partnering with more featurephone players to carry features like Voice Assistant and software Android Go as it targets the mass market for the next phase of growth, Google’s vice-president for Next Billion Users, Caesar Sengupta, told ET. Excerpts:
You earlier said that the next billion users will come through smartphones, but you have now partnered with Reliance Jio for JioPhone, which is a feature phone. Has that strategy changed?
No, smartphones are a much better experience since you are not limited to what comes with the phone. Assistant is a pretty foundational experience which works really well for new users to the Internet since it is voice-based. So when Reliance came to us for JioPhone, we decided to enable it because our fundamental belief is we will go where our users are and this is reaching a set of users who are new to the Internet.

Are you looking at more such partnerships? Is there a monetising opportunity in featurephones?
We’re open, if there are users and experience is decent enough and if it’s a reasonable platform, we will work on it. It’s (monetising opportunity) very early, but people can search for things, there are ads on search, so we can monetise through that. I’m sure the specific monetisation and ads will be different but it’s still early.

What will be your share of focus on entry-level phones?
Focus will be on all tiers. In India, we have to bring Pixel 2, then there’s a large segment of users who are using mid-level smartphones and will use Tez. There’s a segment of users below them who have been buying cheap smartphones but not really getting a good experience. We want to make sure those people get good experience (through Android Go).

What’s your plan for the next 2-3 years in the hardware space?
We’ve just started hardware, but it’s a very big effort from us and a multi-year effort. Look at the number of products Google announced last year and this year. There were two phones, two speakers, new PixelBook. Next year would be even better.

What is the road map for products like Tez launched only for India?
We realise that once you build something well for India, it will work everywhere. Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam are very similar in many aspects and we may consider them over the next few years.