Indian Mobile Smartphone Industry - Part1

 

 

Phone enthusiast around the world has been seeing a shift in dynamics. If you are onelike me, you must have noticed it already.

India has started to get several FIRST-UP smart phone launches these days. Thanks to big corporations like Apple & Nokia shifting its primary bases from China to India.

Just to name a few others in the line, OPPO & Xiaomi have built totally new brands for India named Poco & Realme whereas big time hitters like Samsung have aggressively priced M series phones , dedicated for India, here.

Not only do these FIRST-up India offerings put the devices that the Westerners use, to shame in terms of price-to-performance ratios, but positively, they are also made in India.

 So in this article let's explore why all of a sudden the Indian Smartphone industry has become such a honey pot for investors?  

And let also address that – if India can really take this upcoming smartphone boom to the next level while becoming the REAL smartphone SUPERPOWER.

This South Asian subcontinent did already have a brief moment of fame with its home-grown smartphone brand – called Micromax - a few years ago. Back in 2014, over 65% of the smartphones in India where owned by Indian brands like Micromax, , Intex , Karbonn and Lava, While that very same year, an Indian brand actually managed to beat Samsung’s numbers for the first time in the history of  the country & had, for a small duration, became the largest mobile brand in India. Yes, it was Micromax who pulled that off.

Although, This sudden outburst of domestic hit didn't last very long, as just a 3 years later, The Korean smartphone giant re-claimed the lost throne, while Chinese brands like Xiaomi, OPPO and Vivo started getting their foot inside one of the World’s most lucrative smartphone market.

Turns out, the Indian brands lost their track while this new onslaught was outside their doors, as their primary tactic was just to import ready-made phones from 2^nd and 3^rd tier Chinese phones, brand their logos & sell them to Indian customers. Of course this strategy failed miserably when the chinese investor backed giants like Xiaomi and OPPO, who had pretty heavy R&D support, massive control over their hardware, as well as much deeper pockets. According to this insightful Gadgets360 article, when these Chinese brands came to Indian shores, they massively upped their customer acquisition cots to $110 per customer. Compare that to a paltry $3 dollars bandwidth by local brands.