text: Twitter Expands India Base For Global Boost, CIO News, ET CIO
  March 25, 2022, 16:11 IST
  BENGALURU: Twitter has formed an in-region team in India with cross-functional expertise as part of a move to accelerate globally its growth momentum by 2023 end. The social networking site expects its revenue to more than double to $7.5 billion in 2023, from $3.7 billion in 2020. It also plans to reach 315 million monetisable daily active users by the end of 2023.
  Apurva Dalal, engineering site leader and director of engineering in Twitter India, said, "India is a high-priority market for Twitter. We will not just have engineers in India, but have product, design, research, data science and a whole conglomerate of partners for content and curation. We are going to focus on the Indian audience." Dalal joined Twitter last April, before which he was with Uber.
  Outside the US, Twitter has dedicated engineering teams in London, Toronto, Singapore and Bengaluru. "We are building for India, building for the world from India, and we are leveraging top tech talent," he said.
  Under Dalal's watch, Twitter's tech hub in Bengaluru has grown to a few hundred employees. "We grew more than 150% in our India tech hub in 2021. We are building many platforms around data, ML, and cloud, which we think are enablers for monetisation. A lot of platformisation work is happening in India for upcoming scale and development velocity goals. We are building teams in India for monetisation, revenue, payment and building subscription. We are in the centre of solving for three things—users, revenue and developer velocity," he said.
  During its analyst day last year, Twitter said it is one of the largest Kafka users in the industry, with upwards of 200 million Kafka events processed every second.
  Kafka processes streaming data in real time and it has helped Twitter with improved relevance.
  The company is hiring engineers across Android, backend, machine learning, data. It is focusing on three themes—personalisation, selection for our audience partners, and product improvement. Statista's data showed that Twitter India had 23.6 million users as of January this year.
  Twitter is going big on regional content. It supports 11 Indian languages. Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Telugu are the most popular ones. More than 50% of its tweets are non-English.
  "Tamil audiences are more enthusiastic about Spaces (live audio conversations). We did foundational research to understand what the Indian audience needs, and we found out that people have interest in sports, and cricket is a huge conversation driver," he said.
  During the recent IPL auction, Twitter rolled out a curated tab to improve discoverability of content.
  "We can take learnings from sports and cricket, to other areas like entertainment and business for a curated and immersive experience. We want users to discover light-hearted content on Twitter – a lot more videos, GIFs, so that they can come to Twitter to unwind too," Dalal added.