Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Twitter Inc. said it would acquire ZipDial Mobile Solutions Pvt, an Indian marketing company, to expand its capabilities on mobile phones in emerging markets.

ZipDial’s technology allows Twitter to more efficiently deliver marketing content to phones with low connectivity, Twitter said in a blog post. Twitter agreed to pay about $30 million for the company, said a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. Natalie Miyake, a Twitter spokeswoman, declined to comment on the price.

Twitter’s ZipDial purchase comes amid increasing interest by foreign technology companies in India, where the number of Internet users is projected to exceed half a billion by 2018. The South Asian nation is expected to become the world’s fastest growing major economy by 2017, the International Monetary Fund said today.

ZipDial will help Twitter reach users who are being introduced to the Internet for the first time via mobile phones, the company said. Its technology is “especially appealing in areas where people aren’t always connected to data or only access data through intermittent wifi networks,” Twitter said in the blog post.

The deal will also give Twitter an engineering office in Bengaluru, the city formerly known as Bangalore, where ZipDial is based, the company said.