Impact: Facebook’s extreme growth trajectory in India is being driven by smartphone penetration. According to a Nielsen India report from September of last year, the number of smartphone users there exploded 89% to 51 million from 27 million in 2012. What’s more, the demographic group with the largest growth during that period was youth between 16 and 18 years old, which saw it percentage of smartphone users go from 5% to 22%. That kind of data goes a long way in explaining Facebook’s meteoric rise since 2010 when the company opened its first office in Hyderabad and counted 8 million users. As in China, smartphone prices are falling swiftly in India. Consumers there have plenty of low cost devices manufactured at home, and others imported from China in the Rs 5,000 ($85) to 6,000 ($100) range. Smartphones may only be 17% of the total mobile phone user base in urban India according to Nielsen, but the rate of adoption is climbing fast. Kids being kids, many of those new Facebook users may move onto other social media long before the social network can get close to 1 billion active users. Still, these trends bode well across the board for the games industry whether you are talking mobile, console or computer content. Last year the Internet and Mobile Association of India estimated there were 31.7 million online gamers, of which 14.6 million of those played games on their mobile devices. Not a huge number yet, but those numbers are going to go up dramatically.