Warning: Tough Times Ahead For The Indian Smartphone Brands | TechTree.com

Warning: Tough Times Ahead For The Indian Smartphone Brands

Indian brands will have to spend on infrastructure to have better control over pricing and brace themselves for Chinese onslaught

 

One has to be on their toes when it comes to innovation and at a time when the mobile market is at a crucial juncture, the decision of to be or not to be may be the difference between surviving and losing out.

Indian mobile phone scenario is much different from what it was a year ago. While the neighboring China was seeing some kind of a revolution, India despite being the fastest growing markets had never been flooded by brands.

A year ago, Samsung was still the market leader with Indian brands of Micromax, Karbonn and Lava vying for a spot behind Samsung. Everything changed with the entry of Moto G, which showed that the days of feeling and touching a mobile phone before buying it is gone.

Such was the impact that they completely re-aligned the market strategy and climbed to fourth spot in sales only by selling online. The other budget smartphone makers Xiaomi and Asus, who have also decided to go online, have been pushing the Indian brands hard and going out of stock.

Is it time that the Indian brands pulled up their socks?

Yes it is. They will have to price their devices better and for that they will have to build the infrastructure.

Similar to their Chinese counterparts, the India brands provided budget smartphones that boasted of specs offered by other high-end devices. It was all about getting the phone assembled with required configuration in China and then selling it in India.

With the entry of Chinese brands, it is this market that they will be targeting. On the other hand Samsung has taken a beating both in India and China recently and they will surely realign their market strategy. This does sound alarm bells for the Indian brands.

Despite the growth of smartphones, the Micromax also relies heavily on the feature phones to make up the numbers. With the feature phone demand falling by 16% in Q2 of 2014 and are in danger of being extinct species, the battle field has clearly shifted to the smartphones.

Remember some of the big Chinese companies are yet to shift their focus to India. While Lenovo hasn’t made that big a push, it looks like Xiaomi wasn’t expecting one lakh pre-orders when it opened the bookings for Mi3 even before launching it. Then we have Huawei, the third largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, who hasn’t even stepped into India.

On a whole it is time that the Indian brands brace themselves up for some stiff competition and about time that they reduced their dependency on the Chinese market to provide them tailor-made handsets.

Lava seems to have taken a clue and launched the first Indian built UI, Hive, a few days ago. This should be one small step towards becoming self-sufficient and hopefully others will follow.

The most important decision would be to build their own manufacturing units and R&D centres in India, which would insulate the Indian companies from any outside influence.

As a big advantage, the Google had announced the Indian companies – Micromax, Karbonn and Spice – as the partners for the Android One program and this should provide them ample boost to disassociate from the Chinese market as quickly as possible.

For the time being Micromax can rest on the glory of beating Samsung in mobile phones’ sales in India and closing in on smartphone sales too. If they are happy only with this then they may blown away when rough weather - which might be well on its way - hits them.


TAGS: Mobile Phones, Indian Smartphone Market

 
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