PhonePe Opens A New Battlefront | PhonePe Indus App Store News | CNBC-TV18 | N18V

If there's a billion of anything and there's only one person serving the market, it just means that the second person who actually manages to get into the market will pick up a pretty large piece of the pie just by their very presence. I genuinely believe, I've only worked in the consumer internet space 10 years in the States, 12 years, I genuinely believe people crave choices. In fact, attention spans are shrinking everywhere you go, so even if they have a favorite app in one category, they keep trying out new stuff. The same has to be true of app stores. That's my genuine belief: as long as other app stores can exist, I think people will try them out. If we build a great product, then I think we can get a pretty good share of the market. I think that's why we're actually getting in. India deserves another app store.

You'll have to allow me a couple of minutes possibly. The platform fees is free for the first year only. The reason is free obviously is we're a late entrance into the market and we need to prove to the developers that there's value in our platform. So it is free because we needed to make it free; that's the fastest way to get a lot of app developers in. We have about 2 lakh apps listed on the app store today. We hope to get to about half a million by year end. So the only way to do that is to take any friction out. We've taken the path of least resistance. That's more of a sort of early stage growth hack, if you may. As far as in-app billing and payments is concerned, we actually have a very strong point of view. We are the biggest beneficiaries of the interoperability of UPI from 8 years ago. All you had before that were closed banking apps and closed wallets. If any of them had become as large as Play Store or App Store, we don't think we could have entered the payments market. Similarly, in this case, we see it as ridiculous for us as a payments company that's benefited from interoperability to say, 'Come to my app store, we are fresh, we are new, it's a new way of thinking, but by the way, same old restriction.' Why, if you don't like my billing service or you don't like my catalog service, why the hell would I force you to use it? This whole idea of forcing people to do something is very 2009 and we don't subscribe to it.

I said this after the panel at the event, and I've told her this as well: as long as the law of the land allows for real money games, we will allow them on the platform. Our position as a platform is going to be that we will abide by the law of the land that is penned down. I find it hypocritical that Google allows Dream11 to advertise on YouTube and Google and everywhere else and take their ad dollars, but won't let them list on the Play Store. I think that's having your cake and eating it too. If you want the ad dollars from Dream11, for example, then we would allow Dream11 to be listed. If the government tells us no, that category is not allowed or this set of games within that category is not allowed, we will deal with them. We will not apply our own filters on top. That's not our brief. When we offer payments to merchants, we KYC everyone per the law of the land or the regulations of the land. If you don't meet the regulatory requirements, we will not allow you to get payment gateway services. But if you do, I don't opine on what business you're in. I only look at whether you have the right documentation. Similarly, on the app store, why should I care what your app is doing? Tomorrow, certain types of fashion apps or content apps or news apps might be out of favor. That's not an app store's place to actually opine boundaries.

A lot of localized advertising opportunity will arise if you can show that there are consumers for it because it's new. I think video-based discovery, as we said, is one where developers are willing and are increasingly spending because they're seeing new ROI. Video advertising is the big new frontier in the ad space. By offering it on deck on the platform, I think we can pick up fair money.

Almost all of them were in the audience. We're talking clearly to everybody. I can't say more. That one's a tricky turf, as you know, because of the competitive environment. There are barriers to entry and a lot of them that we need to overcome, but we're getting there sooner than we expected.

I actually do believe, by the way, and I have a lot of friends from Google, I do believe that they will actually welcome a challenger in the market because I think it'll bust a few myths. I'll give you an example. I know that a bunch of my colleagues in the industry hate the fact that you have to bid on your own brand name. There was a question from the gentleman from Bharat Matrimony who in the past has actually sued Google over this. He said, 'I want to make sure you will not make me advertise on your brand name.' My counter question to him was, 'Do you advertise on Shaadi's name?' If you want to do that, you can't protest this. I'm just giving that as an example. There are certain things where we will actually take a position similar to Google's, but we will publish it. There are certain positions where we'll take a contrarian view, and that's how competition sort of takes off. I think for Google's sake, I will say this as well: I have never had a problem with Google charging 30%. I don't care if they actually charged 80%, as long as other app stores could exist, including OEM app stores, could exist and thrive without Google trying to actually restrict access there. I don't think they could ever charge much more than the market will allow. Markets balance out when there's competition. So we are trying to create competition. Are they going to be thrilled about it? No. But I hope they will appreciate, given the climate globally, and by the way, this is not an India thing only. It's playing out in the US and on their home turf, it's playing out in Europe. You've seen the rulings there. There's enough evidence from Korea, Japan, China. There's enough evidence that countries, developer communities, consumers even are saying we want more competition. This is a critical part of the internet.

No, actually what I said was, the question posed to me was, 'Will my market share increase or decrease?' I said, 'If I say it will not increase, you'll call me a hypocrite because you know it probably will. If I said I'm going to try and grab it, you'll call me an opportunist. So I'm just going to split the difference and say it'll change. There might be a new normal. Maybe there's no change. Maybe they just bounce back and we're back where we were before.' I don't know. Some of these things, we've seen this with Yes Bank when we were on the other side of a moratorium. Short-term, for a few days, there was a big impact on our numbers. We bounced back in less than 3 days. I don't know when they bounce back. As I said, without getting into the why and how and what of it, as a company, we are not one that wishes ill on anybody in the market. We like competing fiercely. We like competing hard with difficult, tough competitors. It makes us better. I hope they survive and thrive, so more power to them as well.