by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Markets, Sales, SMEs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : While the top five smartphone brands currently enjoy a market share exceeding 75 per cent in India, whatever is left is now being shared by over 88 smartphone brands — leaving a mere 0.3 per cent market share for each player.
Players like Panasonic and Videocon are among those 88 smartphone brands sharing the revenue of nearly Rs 43,560 crore — or Rs 475 crore revenue per brand (on average).
On the other hand, Samsung alone posted sales of over Rs 37,000 crore for its mobile phone business in India in the financial year 2018, followed by arch rival Xiaomi at nearly Rs 23,000 crore.
Oppo Mobiles registered nearly Rs 12,000 crore in revenue while Vivo crossed Rs 11,000 crore in the FY 2018.
The big question is: How many of these 88 brands will be able to survive the hyper-competitive and highly price-conscious Indian market?
“As a result of the increased consolidation among the top five smartphone brands, the available potential sphere of play for other smartphone players has significantly decreased,” said Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group (IIG) at the market research firm CyberMedia Research (CMR).
Over the past two years, feature phone to smartphones upgrade has not picked up as anticipated.
“This was primarily due to the spike in refurbished phones/second hand phone market, along with the rapid uptake of 4G feature phones. Coupled with this, the lack of smartphone offerings providing optimal experience under sub-Rs 6,000, is also affecting the upgrades,” Ram told IANS.
Amid massive investment in retail stores, hiring more staff and increasing ad spends as users are spoilt for choices, the pinch would soon affect many of those 88 vendors sooner than later, and most will either shut shops or enter newer businesses.
However, for Chinese brands with deep pockets and a stagnating market back home, India would continue to remain a attractive bet.
“They can afford to bleed, and any profit would be welcome. We believe they would continue to fight in the market,” said Swati Kalia, an analyst at IIG, CMR.
The smartphone market in India grew 14.5 per cent in 2018 with the highest-ever shipments of 142.3 million units, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Xiaomi with 28.9 market share shipped 41.1 million units while Samsung with 22.4 per cent market share shipped 31.9 million in FY 2018.
Vivo shipped 14.2 million units with 10 per cent market share while OPPO shipped 10.2 million units and captured 7.2 per cent market share.
In such a scenario, the road ahead only gets tougher for the rest of the players.
“For large consumer-durable conglomerates, including the likes of Panasonic and Videocon, it makes more sense to look at broader synergies available from new blue sky opportunities such as Internet of Things (IoT) and the connected home,” noted Amit Sharma, another Analyst at IIG, CMR.
(Nishant Arora can be reached at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : Hey Alexa! Please play “Bhaja Govindam” by M.S. Subbulakshmi, goes the command every morning at my home and Alexa takes no time in obliging, playing the song by the legendary Carnatic vocalist as breakfast begins to roll.
This has become a routine at millions of Indian homes, indicating a clear trend about voice becoming the next conversational platform between people and devices.
As we head toward a world where data-driven machine intelligence powers conversations between brands and consumers, Indian consumers are now ready for this, frequently using smartphones to interact with brands and coordinate tasks.
According to Forrester, mobile penetration has allowed rapid, leapfrogging acceleration among metropolitan Indian online adults in the uptake of wearable devices and other smart technology.
Nearly 54 per cent Indians now use at least one wearable device. The smart home is at a similar turning point: 30 per cent use a smart TV, 16 per cent use a voice assistant speaker like Alexa-rich Amazon Echo or Google Assistant-driven Home, and 36 per cent use smart home devices like Internet-connected thermostats or home audio systems.
According to Meenakshi Tiwari, Forecast Analyst at Forrester, most of the digital consumers in India today are mobile consumers, doing multi-tasking on the go.
“Voice has much bigger role to play in the circumstance, which is further verified by the fact that 28 per cent of search queries in India are done by voice, and Hindi voice search queries are growing at over 400 per cent year on year,” she told IANS.
It gives clear indication that voice will play a bigger role in India’s digital space in near future.
“Smart speaker will also play critical in this direction which is evident from their increasing shipment and time spent by consumer on it,” Tiwai added.
According to market research firm International Data Corp (IDC), the smart speakers’ category in India, led by Amazon, grew 43 per cent in the second quarter of 2018.
“I personally believe that voice as a platform is going to lead the next wave of content searches, social conservation, and eventually, it will also become the medium of commerce, said Jaipal Singh, Senior Analyst, IDC India.
We already have voice-enabled devices which help us set routines, automate home appliances and provide on-demand information.
“In terms of devices install base in 2018, it has significantly improved as vendors have shipped a set of new devices ranging from mobile phones, ear pods, TVs and smart speakers with voice assistants feature enabled on them,” Singh told IANS.
This novelty feature is really attracting a wide segment of users and obviously, millennials and Gen Z are leading the adoption as they are more comfortable to experiment with new technology.
According to Singh, smart speakers are very popular among the kids who mostly use those for educational content, listening mythological stories quizzing and playing games.
“However, playing music and setting alarms, asking for information from the internet are some of the popular tasks that Indian users prefer asking to voice assistants,” the IDC analyst said.
There are still concerns on users spending time with voice assistants as it is yet to get the desired traction in India.
However, refined use cases with localised experiences are expected to lead the desired growth of voice-based devices in the coming years, the experts stressed.
(Nishant Arora can be reached at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Sales, SMEs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : Once the darling of Indian smartphone users, desi brands like Micromax, Karbonn, Lava, Intex and few others have nearly been decimated by affordable-yet-powerful devices from the Chinese vendors that have flooded both online and offline channels.
In the 2013-2014 period, the domestic brands gained great traction and enjoyed 40-45 per cent market share — till the time Chinese behemoths entered the fray.
Led by Xiaomi, the China-based manufacturers registered 58 per cent market share while Indian local brands had a mere 13 per cent market share in the third quarter (July-August-September) of 2018, according to latest figures shared by Counterpoint Research.
Riding on the success of its budget Redmi series, Xiaomi touched a new high in the third quarter of 2018 in India. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), Xiaomi shipped 11.7 million units and became the top brand with 27.3 per cent share in the third quarter.
Today, smartphones contribute to over 90 per cent of the sale volume for Xiaomi in India and recently, the company entered into new segments like TVs, routers and air purifiers etc which got popular too.
Despite the government push “the local vendor fell prey to China-based vendors owing to powerful specifications at a very affordable and aggressive pricing, thus leading to these vendors almost fading away from the Indian smartphone market,” stressed Upasana Joshi, Associate Research Manager, Client Devices, IDC India.
According to Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CyberMedia Research (CMR), the rate of change of smartphone technology is phenomenally swift and today, disruption is the rule of the game.
“Smartphones are becoming incredibly sophisticated with decreasing costs. With increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), it is imperative for smartphone brands to ramp up their internal research and development, and product engineering capabilities,” Ram told IANS.
Xiaomi has managed to generate a strong pull for its brand through aggressive product specs and pricing which very few brands can match.
“This has helped the brand to gain mind share, followed by market share and become the top smartphone brand in India in its third year of India operations,” said Tarun Pathak, Associate Director at Counterpoint Research.
Later, Pathak added, the strong demand for Xiaomi’s products during flash sales further spiked consumer interest with retailers too started showing interest in stocking Xiaomi products as they sell very fast.
Aiming to help domestic smartphone manufacturers recover lost ground, the government has taken several measures in the recent past, like easing norms for local manufacturing and hiking customs duty on mobile phones.
The government also came up with a phased manufacturing plan to boost indigenous production of mobile phones by providing tax relief and other incentives on components and accessories used for the devices.
However, most of the Chinese vendors are now manufacturing and locally sourcing parts so they are not affected by changes in the policy.
Unless the Indian vendors ramp up research and development, they will not succeed at the smartphone wars. ”
“They cannot simply rely on just contract manufacturers to get them their competitive edge,” Ram noted.
There is, however, a thin silver lining for the Indian players.
In the less than Rs 5,000 segment lies a huge potential for FTBs (first-time buyers) of smartphones and the ones migrating from feature phones to smartphones.
“Currently, there is no vendor in the market who is focusing on this segment as availability of easy financing schemes has raised the overall average selling price (ASP) of smartphones.”
“If local vendors focus on this less than 5K segment and launch products which are equivalent in all means to China-based vendors (quality, pricing and promotions) along with some subsidies from Telco players like Reliance and Airtel, it might help them make a comeback,” explained Joshi.
With the revised government policies on e-commerce players and level-playing game for all ecosystem channel partners, offline will continue to remain relevant along with a power-play game in the online channel too for all the smartphone players.
“Micromax, Intex, Karbonn and Lava have had deep reach and presence across offline retail counters. They can leverage on this strength and come back to market with good quality, high-rated specifications at affordable prices,” said Joshi.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Entrepreneurship, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : Amid a talented pool of tech entrepreneurs and start-ups in India live millions of women and under-represented communities, chasing opportunities to enter the new digital world, and the onus is right on the tech giants to skill them and bridge the digital divide, says a top Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive.
According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS — online retail giant Amazon’s Cloud business arm — the time is now ripe for tech companies to approach talented youth in rural India, skill and connect them to the digital mainstream in order to achieve “inclusive innovation”.
“India is unique. You have this highly educated population of tech entrepreneurs and start-ups and then you go into villages which are like a different world altogether.
“You got to access the talent pool there, make sure that you skill them so that they have the capabilities and opportunities to take advantage of this whole new world,” said Carlson, who is viewed as one of the most powerful women in the global tech scene.
For her, healthcare and education are the two sectors that need big tech intervention.
“I think for India, we have to create new mechanisms to educate people in emerging technologies like Cloud computing. We did the same in Kenya with the non-profit Digital Divide Data (DDD) and trained 30-60 people (including women) in Cloud computing as a stepping stone to more advanced IT careers and saw positive results,” Carlson told IANS during her second visit to India last week.
Today, the DDD and AWS graduates are earning five times more than their peers.
“We put them through an intensive six-month training. We put them to work at the Kenyan National Museum and now we have them working in other vocations. They are now in jobs that pay about $85,000 a year. That is more than they would make in three lifetimes in Africa,” Carlson noted.
She knows that this training model works and now she wants to scale it up for countries like India.
In the US, Northern Virginia Community College, in collaboration with the “AWS Educate” programme, has launched a Cloud computing specialisation as part of its Information Systems Technology (IST) Associate of Applied Science degree that started this autumn.
The class has already started and during the AWS education summit recently, it launched the same programme with Los Angeles community colleges.
“I spoke to some of your government officials, including in the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC), in the last couple of days and asked them why don’t we do the same here for vocational training in Cloud computing,” informed Carlson.
AWS “EdStart” programme is helping entrepreneurs in India build the next generation of online learning, analytics and campus management solutions on the AWS Cloud. The programme is designed to enable EdTech start-ups move faster with specially-tailored benefits.
AWS “Edstart” members in India include start-ups like doubtbox, Classplus, Quizizz, NEETprep.com, examly, StudyBoard, Bloombench, Multibhashi, proctor, I&WE and bookbhook.com , among others.
Carlson, who started her career as a speech and language pathologist, also looks at the Indian health care scenario with hope in her eyes.
“When I was here on my first visit two years ago, one of the things that struck me personally the most was the number of start-ups with virtual healthcare applications running on AWS,” she recalled.
The start-ups were working in the field of mapping the cornea to identify heart disease.
“I thought about that a lot over two years and, in these years, the number of both the companies and tools available to take healthcare to the next level in India is kind of off the charts,” said Carlson.
To help accelerate the discovery of new, targeted treatments for patients, Accenture and Merck (known as MSD), in collaboration with AWS, this month decided to launch a Cloud-based informatics research platform.
“This is an example of how Cloud computing is truly allowing for innovations at speed and at scale that we did not even think about years ago. This is where I think India is just going to be at much advantage, owing to the growing healthcare start-ups,” added Carlson.
“We have to ensure that you have policies that allow these things to get moving on Cloud because what you don’t want is 80 per cent of your IT budget to be spent on maintenance of the systems,” Carlson emphasised.
She recalled an incident when she took Amazon Cloud computing and its benefits to the US government in 2010 and an official asked her: “Are you here to sell books?”
“Policymakers in India definitely have a clear idea of what Cloud is. Everybody knows what Cloud computing is now. The world has changed quickly so that is a good thing,” she said.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Marketing Basics, Markets, Sales, SMEs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : As Apple refreshed its luxury iPhone line-up last week, Manu Jain who is Vice President, Xiaomi Global and Managing Director, Xiaomi India, tweeted: “Choose wisely — MI (Xiaomi) or EMI”.
Jain reacted to a follower who mentioned that one has to shell out Rs 12,075 a month as zero-cost EMI for a period of one year to own the 512GB variant of iPhone XS Max that will come for a mind-boggling Rs 144,900 in India.
Apple this month announced two other new models. The iPhone XS with 512GB storage model will cost Rs 134,900 and the cheapest of the lot, the iPhone XR, has a starting price (64GB) of Rs 76,900 in India.
The message from the $1 trillion company is loud and clear: Come what may, either own a new iPhone with a higher price tag or adjust with older and discounted models.
Here is the truth: Apple shipped 63 million iPhone X’s (now discontinued) till August this year. According to Counterpoint Research, iPhone X is on track to become the most successful revenue and profit-generating iPhone ever.
These 63 million-odd consumers are set to upgrade to new “luxury” iPhones – down payment or via EMI route — so the global smartphone powerhouse is safe here.
India contributed to just one per cent of the total iPhone X shipments till August. In 2017, Apple sold nearly 3.2 million iPhones in India and the company does not appear to be either in a panic or aggressive mode to change the status quo at the moment.
The company is also not in a mood to compete with Xiaomi or other Chinese brands but aims to keep its brand image and aspirational value intact, say experts.
“Apple remains a luxury brand and this has been their overall strategy for years. India is not in the list of top 10 global markets for them when it comes to new iPhone launches. The company has a strong loyal base globally who will buy its devices despite the hefty price tag,” Jaipal Singh, Associate Research Manager, Client Devices, IDC India, told IANS.
“For the Indian market, Apple will never compete with Chinese brands by lowering prices of new iPhones,” Singh added.
According to Tarun Pathak, Associate Director, Mobile Devices and Ecosystems at Counterpoint Research, hardcore Apple users would be willing to shell out the hefty price because owning a new Apple device is a status symbol for them.
“However, that section is still small. We believe that Apple strategy in India should be to sell more iPhones rather than new iPhones. Given the stickiness of the iOS ecosystem, these older iPhone users are likely to upgrade to iPhone only,” Pathak told IANS.
This is exactly what Apple has done. The company has slashed prices of older iPhones for the Indian consumers who want to upgrade to iPhone 7, iPhone 8 and even iPhone X.
Apple has discontinued the “super premium” iPhone X that actually did quite well despite low sale predictions.
The Cupertino-based company has also bid goodbye to iPhone SE – its least expensive model which was being assembled in India and the iPhone 6s — marking the end of iPhones with headphone jacks.
According to Pathak, the fact is that aspirational user audience is more in number than hardcore iPhone users in India. So there can be uptick in Apple numbers driven by cheaper older generation iPhones.
Depending on the quarter, the older generation iPhones capture somewhat half to two-third of Apple’s total sales in India.
“As custom duty continues to have impact on iPhone prices and making new iPhones is costlier, the price cut and subsequent promotions of older generation iPhones can increase iPhone sales in India. iPhone 7 can be the new iPhone 6 for Apple in the country,” noted Pathak.
Since Apple does not manufacture or assemble its products in India, the price will always be on the higher side.
“What Apple can do for the Indian market is to open experiences centres, the way Samsung and OnePlus have done, to pull more Android users towards its ecosystem. A bigger retail presence will help Apple gain more share in the price-sensitive Indian market,” Singh emphasised.
Apple is currently going through an overhaul under Michel Coulomb, the new head of the India operations who took over from Sanjay Kaul in December last year.
The iPhone maker is also seeking tax relief and other incentives from the government to begin assembling more handsets in the country and its proposal to set up a manufacturing unit is reportedly being evaluated.
According to Pathak, new iPhones can still be a good upgrade for users in India which have skipped the previous iPhone generations but the company will never lower the prices for new iPhones.
In a nutshell, CEO Tim Cook has clearly told India that Apple is the Ferrari in the world of smartphones and to own that exclusiveness, shell out extra – cash down or EMI — as others are doing.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
