Google Maps has announced that, from March 1, 2025, Indian developers will get “free” access to its suite of tools for up to $6,800 (more than INR 5.7 lakh) each month, in response to increasing competition from regional geotech companies. Tina Weyand, Google Maps’ senior director of product management, stated in a blog post that local developers will get “free” access to the company’s products, including software development kits (SDKs) and environment application programming interfaces (APIs), up to the specified monthly cap.
Google Maps’ existing fixed $200 monthly credit will be replaced by a newly announced pay structure. Developers will be able to create more for free after March 1, 2025, when they will have one month’s worth of free access to all of Google’s products, including the Maps, Routes, Places, and Environment APIs and SDKs. According to Weyand, this implies that developers in India would soon have access to up to $6,800 in free usage per month, spread across all products, in place of the company’s current fixed $200 monthly credit.
Unlimited Free Usage For Maps Embed API and Maps SDK
Maps Embed API and Maps SDK will continue to offer “unlimited free usage,” according to tech giant Google. Additionally, the updated pricing plans will allow developers to develop more effective solutions and experiment with the APIs and SDKs. It is anticipated that this approach will help Google better compete with regional firms like MapmyIndia and Ola’s Krutrim, particularly in terms of pricing, and will attract smaller developers. This comes after Google reduced the cost of its Maps platform in July of this year and introduced new pricing for Indian developers that is specifically altered for India. A partnership with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) was then revealed by the giant tech company, which will provide developers creating apps on the state-backed network with up to 90% off on specific Google Maps APIs.
Google Forming New Strategies to Remain Ahead in the Race
Google’s cost-cutting action followed Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of Ola Consumer, urging Indian developers to abandon Google Maps. Aggarwal announced at the time that all developers on the Krutrim platform would have free access to Ola Maps for a year and that developers would receive more than INR 100 Cr in free credits. In the meantime, MapmyIndia has also been putting up a strong fight against Google Maps.
Google Maps launched a number of India-specific features earlier this year, such as flyovers, narrow road callouts, and Address Descriptors, which allow users to accurately pinpoint a location inside intricate city road networks. Google has launched Gemini AI in Docs, which is a related development. Compared to competing AI models, it can more clearly generate photo-realistic images of people, landscapes, and animals with only text cues. Gemini AI may be effectively used by users to upload full-bleed photos that fill a document’s page. Additionally, it can be used to produce inline visuals for promotional flyers, marketing campaign briefs, and digital restaurant menus.
With the introduction of a new country-specific price structure, Google is making it easier to build location-based solutions by cutting the pricing of the Google Maps Platform for developers in India by as much as 70% starting from 1st August 2024.
The IT giant is teaming up with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to provide developers working on ONDC with exclusive discounts for a limited time. According to the company, this will lead to a steep discount of up to 90% on certain Google Maps Platform APIs that power e-commerce and related use cases.
Accepting Payments in INR
Google has started taking payments in Indian Rupees (INR), as announced at its developer event Google I/O Connect Bengaluru on 17 July 2024. The previous system used US dollars for payments made by clients in India.
With this price cut, the Google Maps Platform will be more affordable for developers in the country, according to Google. This will allow them to build location-based solutions more easily.
However, these announcements correspond with Ola head Bhavish Aggarwal’s public encouragement of developers to use Ola Maps for their mapping needs, giving a free one-year subscription.
Accessible Solely to Clients Located in India
Google has announced that its new pricing structure will be exclusive to consumers in India who are billed in India and experience the bulk of their usage in the nation. Customers who do not fulfil these requirements will not be eligible for the discounted price structure, as it will be monitored to ensure eligibility.
Starting from 1 August 2024, all new customers headquartered in India will be allowed to pay in INR. Existing customers have the option to continue being charged in US dollars or switch to INR.
Google Maps Platform and Google Cloud can be used by developers with a single billing account, according to the announcement.
New Pricing Dynamics for Google Maps Platform and ONDC Integration
According to the announcement, developers working on ONDC projects will have access to exclusive prices on select APIs through Google Maps Platform partners. All four nodes in the ONDC network—gateway, seller, buyer, and technical service provider—will be able to take advantage of the discounted pricing.
As an illustration, the current pricing for the Geocoding API on the Google Maps Platform is $5.00 per 1,000 requests for the first 100,000 monthly requests. After August 1, however, clients in India will be charged $1.50 per 1,000 requests for the first 5,000,000 monthly requests for geocoding.
MapmyIndia is known to be one of India’s most comprehensive GPS navigation and tracking solutions providers, which engages the users on multiple platforms. The New Delhi-based company first started its venture online as C.E Infosystems back in 1995 and eventually migrated into consumer navigation devices, fleet-tracking solutions for taxi and trucking companies, and mobile apps. Today, the company offers an entire API stack, IOT devices, and a map app and is also a strong competitor to the global giant Google’s mapping app.
The company has so far mapped over 10.54 million unique destinations, expanded its coverage to over 6.29 million kilometers of the road network, 7068+ cities at street level along with address level for 80+ cities. It also covers 600K+ villages and 3D and 2D landmarks in 86+ different cities. It has so far recorded 18+ million places. Not only that the company has also divulged into offering a variety of different services. It offers services like navigation functionality, tracking and telematics, and location-based analytics.
MapmyIndia has its own API stack through which the company aids developers who are looking to build interesting and unique apps powered by a geo-locational element such as OLX, Flipkart, and smart parking systems. The company now has 5,000 enterprise customers. It also claims to have captured an 80% market share in revenue in the location intelligence space.
It has more than 2,000 customers on its SaaS platforms, which are used for fleet management, location analytics, etc. among other things, made possible because of the successful business model that MaymyIndia brandishes. Other smaller players that compete with MaymyIndia in the IoT-powered GPS devices segment include Asset Tracker, TrakNTell, and CaRPM.
Rakesh Verma and Rashmi Verma, The founders of MapmyIndia
MapmyIndia is an Indian technology company that builds digital map data, telematics services, location-based SAAS, and GIS AI services. The company has its headquarters in New Delhi, regional offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru, and an international office in the San Francisco Bay Area. MapmyIndia was founded in the year 1992 by Rakesh Verma and Rashmi Verma. The company had its humble beginning when the couple launched a startup called C E Info Systems Pvt. Ltd. in New Delhi.
The company initially started working upon developing a web mapping technology and providing products and services required for enhancing marketing and logistics efficiency in the existing organizations in the country. MapmyIndia launched the first Indian interactive digital mapping portal in 2004, which provided free, customized, location-based services.
In 2010, MapmyIndia launched a GPS navigation service called Road Pilot, preloaded with Indian cities, villages and destinations and destinations. As of 2018, it has 5000 plus enterprises customers and over 250 million consumers benefit directly and indirectly from its services. MapmyIndia has also expanded to countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal and soon plans to release maps for the different parts of the world.
During the trying times of the pandemic, the company launched a Covid19 dashboard that mapped containment zones and Covid19 testing and treatment centers across India in real-time and made it available for millions of users free of cost. This immediate move benefitted many users needing this information, whereas Google was slow to respond and released it many months later. It also won the Government of India’s Atmanirbhar App Challenge for its consumer app.
In December 2021, MapmyIndia parent company, the valuation or the market capitalization of the company currently stood at over $1.03 Bn.
MapmyIndia – Products and Services the Company Offers
MapmyIndia is well known for its services like Navigation, Tracking, IoT, Analytics, and web mapping service for desktop and mobile devices.The company also offers advanced GPS tracking devices, car in-dash infotainment, and plug and play on-board diagnostics, car trackers. The navigation service features street-view, public transit information, and turn-by-turn navigation with spoken instructions for vehicles. The main services that the company offers are:
Professionally curated and continuously updated detailed maps that offer unmatched coverage – These maps enable web and mobile applications, with the most granular house-level building data, live traffic, location-based demographics, and socio-economic data.
Real-time data visualization and big data analytics to make more informed decisions – Maps provide a visual context that helps customers to increase productivity, involving location like site selection & resource allocation that helps with efficient business growth.
Smart mobility platform for sale, convenient and efficient mobility – The company is focused on building technology platforms for connected vehicles and travelers paving the road for autonomous multi-modal and safe mobility.
Connected Vehicle IoT ensures the safety and security of vehicles, people, and assets – The company also believes in providing a secure, intelligent, and modular location-based IoT platform, providing accurate and reliable maps with live traffic, road conditions, safety alerts, driving patterns, and other travel services.
MapmyIndia Launched Panoramic Street View Experience
MapmyIndia announced the launch of a panoramic, street view feature, which will be similar to the panoramic, three-dimensional experience of Google Street View. This technology, which is refered to as Mappls RealView, will help the users explore the cities of India almost as Google offers. Currently, Mappls RealView covers metropolitan areas and cities including Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Greater Mumbai, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, and Jaipur. Besides, it also covers nearly 100,000 kms of highways, which links these cities and towns. The repository of Mappls RealView currently consists of 40+ Cr geo-tagged panoramas, videos, and panoramas, as of July 28, 2022.
A metaverse-like experience has also been launched by MapmyIndia, via Mappls. This now features numerous tourists, commercial and residential landmarks and more, across India. In order to create a 3D experience, the listed startup has revealed that it uses satellite imagery data from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
MapmyIndia – eLoc: Electronic location as a key to Digital Address
MapmyIndia has presented eLoc (electronic Location) as the country’s key to digital addresses. eLoc by MapmyIndia helps in finding the electronic location of any place, be it a building, flat, office, business, city, village, locality, road, and so on, is a short, 6 character code (for e.g. 8GDTYX, or MMI000). This is easy to remember, share, type, and provide. eLoc claims to provide a comprehensive, accurate, and precise door-step level, 3D digital map database, and turn by turn navigation solution.
eLoc is essential when a person, business, or official searches for a place by entering the code. They can see the precise map location of the place beside its location, such as reviews, photos other information provided by the place’s owner, businesses, and government. MapmyIndia updates its digital database every quarter and takes into account the feedback of the enterprise’s customers, individual users, on-ground staff, and its own surveyors as well.
When Rakesh and Rashmi Verma first started out to build their own startup they were determined to do something for the country and thus, decided to make it their life’s goal to build the country’s first digital map based on a database of India. This was a difficult task in the beginning because India is known to be vast and with varied geographical and topographical diversities. This is why they decided to make their own database, “Top Down and Bottoms Up”.
The Top Down system included that the company digitally traced whatever paper maps were available using tablets and other IT and electronics devices. On the other hand, the Bottom Up was meant to survey different parts of the country. The team of MapmyIndia played an important role in surveys as they had to practically walk down the streets and by-lanes of the country and also conduct field surveys.
The company has a customer-funded business model and has had popular companies like Coca-Cola, Marico, Hindustan Unilever, and the Indian defense service as their enterprise customers. All of these were possible due to its team of more than 400 surveyors, post-physical and satellite surveys, and most importantly, its 25 years of research. The company now has a repository of more than 2 Cr data points, including 3D data visualizations, telematics, and navigation systems under its belt.
Map Data collection work
The company not only sends more than 400 surveys in the field but also collects hundreds of attributes like footprints, doorsteps, floor numbers, flat numbers, and photographs of every location. It is because of this information that the company has created a digital map of the country of inter-connected information with all those geographical markers and coordinates. MapmyIndia has also entered into more than 100 strategic partnerships with tech and marketing companies, to facilitate the process of data collation faster.
Four Key Markets of MapmyIndia
In terms of the verticals, MapmyIndia addresses four key markets:
Direct consumers (through free and paid app/maps)
Automotive (40% of revenue)
Mobile Internet (20%) and
Enterprises and government (40% of revenue).
MapmyIndia – Revenue and Financials
MapmyIndia QoQ Financials
The operating revenue in Q1 FY23 of MapmyIndia, grew by 50.2% to stand at Rs 65 crore when compared to the revenue it received in the corresponding quarter in FY22.
The expenses of the company also increased by 37.5% in Q1 FY23, when compared with the Rs 27.4 crore expenses it registered in Q1 FY22. The expenses of MapmyIndia in Q1 FY23 are registered at Rs 37.7 crore.
The PAT of MapmyIndia rose 17.5% YoY in the first quarter of FY23, to become Rs 24.2 crore.
MapmyIndia YoY Financials
MapmyIndia’s revenue from operations was close to Rs 200 crore in FY22. The company earlier registered Rs 153 crore in operational revenue, which grew by 31%. The revenue from operations of MapmyIndia was previously noted to be Rs 135.2 crore and Rs 149 crore in FY19 and FY20 respectively.
The expenses of MapmyIndia rose only slightly, by 11%, up from Rs 113 crore in FY21 to become Rs 125 crore in FY22. MapmyIndia expenses were earlier registered at Rs 120.16 crore in FY19 and Rs 131.78 crore in FY20.
MapmyIndia profits after tax (PAT) stood at Rs 87 crore in FY22, which witnessed a 45% rise from Rs 59.4 crore worth in profits in FY21. The profits were earlier Rs 33.6 crore in FY19 and Rs 23.2 crore in FY20.
MapmyIndia – Market Share and Funding of MapmyIndia
MapmyIndia cloud mapping services are used by many well-known tech companies such as Paytm, PhonePe, Amazon, Alexa voice, Flipkart, Uber, Ola, Grofers (now Blinkit), for various things like planning, operations, and customer experience. The company also offers advanced navigation and location services to the vehicle manufacturer and has a 95% market share in GPS navigation in India. It also claims to have 5,000+ enterprise customers with an 80% market share in the location intelligent space.
MapmyIndia Funding
MapmyIndia has so far raised $34 million in venture capital financing in the three rounds since 2007 from Lightbox Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, and Zenrin. In 2015, Flipkart announced that it has acquired 34% stake in the company for Rs 1,600 crore and provided a successful exit to MapmyIndia’s early investors.Over the years, the firm’s value has more than tripled due to the increase in the adoption of its technologies.
Date
Name of the Funding Round
Deal Value
Lead Investors
May 1, 2014
Venture Round
–
Lightbox
February 15, 2009
Series C
$9 mn
Qualcomm Ventures
August 10, 2007
Series B
$25 mn
–
April 19, 2007
Series A
–
–
MapmyIndia IPO
The company filed its draft offer documents with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on August 31, 2021. In its IPO, MapmyIndia was initially expected to go with an offer-for-sale of up to 7,547,959 equity shares by shareholders at a face value of Rs 2 each. This amounted to around 19% of post-offer paid-up equity share capital.
C.E Info Systems, MapmyIndia’s parent company, has increased its total IPO offering to 9,589,478 equity shares, as per the reports dated October 20, 2021. MapmyIndia parent has received SEBI’s approval for its IPO that will consist only of an offer for sale (OFS) from the promoters and the existing shareholders and would offload up to 9,589,478 equity shares, as per the reports dated October 30, 2021. C.E Info Systems had gone live with its IPO on December 9, 2021, where it has seen a strong response from retail investors. The IPO was subscribed around 0.53 times or 53%, as per the reports on 11 am on the same day.
The IPO of MapmyIndia parent witnessed a subscription of over 154 times, as reported on December 13, 2021. The upper limit of the IPO price band was at Rs 1,033, where the offer attracted bids close to Rs 1.12 lakh crore, as disclosed on the same date. The MapmyIndia shares were listed at Rs 1581, which is a 54% premium to its IPO price of Rs 1033 per share.
Google has been fined by the watchdog of Italy in regards to abusing its dominant position in the market. Google already has a dominant position in the market through the Android smartphone platform. The tech company has been facing a lot of antitrust decisions in the recent years from the European Union. Let’s look at why the tech company has been fined by Italy’s watchdog.
Google has been fined by the watchdog of Italy which is estimated to be around USD 123 million for abusing its dominant position in the market. The case is related to the modified version of Google’s OS which is used in cars known as Android Auto.
The case is specifically concentrated on restrictions made by Google on their platform towards an electric car charging app called juice pass which is made by an energy company called Enel X Italia.
Reason for the Fine
Android Auto is a feature offered by Google for the drivers and motorists to access the maps and music streaming device while the vehicle is on the run through a dash mounted device. But Enel X Italia is a third-party app that was denied access to provide its features on Android Auto.
Enel X Italia’s mobile app is available through the smartphone version of the android platform but the users can’t use it or are supposed to use their phone while driving. So, the restriction of access of the app on the Android Auto is equal to cutting down their competition.
The authorities have conveyed that the Google Maps app which provides basic services for the Electric vehicles such as finding and getting directions to charging points is available through Android Auto.
According to the findings of certain authorities, Google did not allow Enel X Italia to develop a version of the JuicePass app which would be compatible with the Android Auto OS.
The JuicePass app had features that would be compatible with the motorists with safety. The app would let the motorists to find an electric vehicle station, providing directions and even reserving a place at the station.
By restricting the availability of the app on the Android Auto the authorities claim that the company has favored its Google Maps which currently provides the features of finding and locating charging stations and in the future can provide the features such as reserving a place and payment.
The ACGM
The AGCM has conveyed that Google had violated the Article 102 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union and has given an order to make the mobile application of JuicePass available on the Android Auto platform.
They also added that Google will have to provide the same access towards the Android Auto to other third-party app developers. AGCM has conveyed that it has concerns about whether Google’s restrictions on apps would have an impact on the electric mobility market.
They added that if this was going to continue then it would permanently impact the future of JuicePass and reduce their user base when the electric mobility market is developing in the country. This would reduce the choice for the consumers and also act as a barrier to innovation.
Google has denied the accusation and has conveyed that they haven’t done anything wrong. At the same time, the company hasn’t confirmed whether they were planning to appeal. The tech giant has confirmed that the restrictions that they place on the applications are necessary to maintain the safety of the drivers.
They conveyed that they have been opening up the platform to more apps over time with thousands of them being more compatible. They have conveyed that they intend to expand its availability.
Google has said in a statement that they have strict guidelines on the types of apps which are currently supported and these apps are based on certain industry standards and driver distraction tests. They said that they disagree with the decision of the authority and are planning to review their options.
FAQ
What is meant by antitrust?
Antitrust laws are regulations that encourage competition by limiting the market power of any particular firm.
What are the 3 antitrust laws?
The three major antitrust laws in the U.S. are: the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA).
What is ACGM in Italy?
The Italian Competition Authority or AGCM is the Competition regulator in Italy.
Conclusion
The AGCM has said that it would monitor the compliance of Google so that it ensures to order it effectively and implements the obligations correctly to provide access to third party apps through Android Auto.
Nitin Konde
