The Best of Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report

Published in

Strategy Square with Sajid

4 min readJun 7, 2017

Kleiner Perkins general partner Mary Meeker launched the 22nd edition of the Internet Trends Report at the Code Conference in California, on May 31, 2017.

Dating back to 1995, when Mary was still an equity analyst at Morgan Stanley, the annual report compiles and analyzes data from a wide range of sources, providing insights on the state of the Internet Economy. Her deck covers a broad array of topics, including global internet user trends, advertising and e-commerce, gaming, online media, digital health, and much, much more.

Here are the key takeaways:

India & China have a special mention and ~26% of the overall 355 slides are dedicated to them.

Global smartphone growth is slowing: Smartphone shipments grew 3 percent year over year last year, versus 10 percent the year before. This is in addition to continued slowing internet growth, which Meeker discussed last year.

Voice is beginning to replace typing in online queries. Twenty percent of mobile queries were made via voice in 2016, while accuracy is now about 95 percent.

In 10 years, Netflix went from 0 to more than 30 percent of home entertainment revenue in the U.S. This is happening while TV viewership continues to decline.

Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker said, quoting Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017 versus 100 million in 1995. Global gaming revenue is estimated to be around $100 billion in 2016, and China is now the top market for interactive gaming.

China remains a fascinating market, Tech companies drive wealth creation in China, where people pay for livestreaming, and bike sharing usage is skyrocketing. (Slides 193–231)

Healthcare: Wearables are gaining adoption with about 25 percent of Americans owning one, up 12 percent from 2016. Leading tech brands are well-positioned in the digital health market, with 60 percent of consumers willing to share their health data with the likes of Google in 2016.

On India: Competition Continues to Intensify…Consumers Winning:

Behind China, but leapfrogging to new technology infrastructure driven by Prime Minister Modi’s policies and 1.2 billion people with digital identity profiles. (Slides 232–287)

One of the “most fascinating markets for the internet on the planet.” — Mary Meeker

While globally internet growth is slowing, that’s not the case in India. Internet user numbers grew more than 28 percent in 2016 (mid-year figures) to 355 million users, second only to China. At 27 percent internet penetration, there’s a lot of room for growth.

Excluding China, Indian users spend the most time on Android devices. People in India spent nearly 150 billion hours on Android devices in 2016. They’ve also become the biggest downloaders of Google Play apps.

India wireless data prices are still relatively high but they’re falling fast, down about 50 percent over the last year. Special mention of Reliance Jio.

Cheaper wireless data encourages greater smartphone ownership and has caused data consumption to jump 9 percent year over year.

India identity. Aadhar Ids + eKYC improving foundational access to broad services

E-commerce in India is also growing, bulwarked by the rise of mobile payment transactions. Monthly digital payment volume via the government’s Universal Payments Interface grew to $359 million this year. Special mention of Paytm.