India is the largest market for the mobile messaging app WhatsApp with 48 million monthly active users (MAUs), says WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum in a interview with Re/code. This is up from more than 40 million MAUs in February 2014, indicating that the company has added eight million MAUs in just two months. The company has also more than doubled its India user base in about eight months. It had reported 20 million MAUs in August 2013 and 25 million MAUs in November 2013. Koum says India has been one of the largest source of growth for the company along with Mexico, Brazil and Russia. The company claims to have crossed 500 million monthly active users worldwide. It also claims that users are sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos on a daily basis. Facebook had acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in February 2013. Interestingly, similar to Facebook which claims to have 100 million MAUs in the country, India is not a significant revenue market for the company yet but it isn’t a no-revenue market. WhatsApp's Head of Business Development Neeraj Arora had told Medianama that this is because WhatsApp has chosen not to push subscriptions on Android so far due to lack of carrier billing integration on Google Play. WhatsApp has also inked three telco partnerships over the past year or so: its first partnership was inked with Reliance Communications in October 2012, followed by Tata Docomo in December 2013 and Uninor last month. The company however doesn't make any money on these carrier deals, rather its more of an awareness and…
