Description
India is one of the largest and fastest-growing smartphone markets in the world, with over 600 million users. However, in the past few years, the Indian smartphone brands have lost their market share and relevance to the Chinese brands, such as Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Realme.
Success Story
Friends, first of all just look at this article. According to the report of 2014, Micromax had become India’s number one mobile vendor by beating even Samsung. At that time, Indian company Micromax had 61 percent share of the mobile phone market. But now also see this article published in 2013. First of all, there is Xiaomi which is at the top with 20 percent market share. After this, China’s Realme, Oppo and OnePlus and then South Korea’s Samsung and America’s Apple brand.
This means that now there is no trace of Indian companies among smartphone brands. But what happened is that mobile phone brands like Micromax and Lava, which used to dominate the Indian market just a few years ago, have almost completely disappeared from the market. And today, despite all the efforts, why are Indian companies failing to win the hearts of their own people? Let us understand this entire issue in details. So friends, our story starts from the year 2010, when data rates were becoming cheaper in India and cheap smartphones were also being launched in the market.
At that time, crores of people started moving towards buying a new smartphone by removing their feature phones. . Till then the Chinese company had not entered the Indian market. At the same time, companies like Samsung and Apple were also known only for their premium smartphones at that time, which were far beyond the reach of a common Indian and then they took advantage of this opportunity.
Micromax and Karbonn Like Indian brands whose smartphones were not so feature rich but all the features that the common Indian was expecting in their smartphones were available at an affordable price. This was the reason why these Indian companies grew very fast in the beginning. But again the fortunes of these companies change when Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi enters India in July 2015. The price of Xiaomi smartphones was around that of Indian smartphones, but their features were going to compete with Apple and Samsung.
Due to this USP, Xiaomi throws Indian smartphone brands out of the market in one fell swoop and our brands are never able to stand after this due to lack of innovations. On one hand, all the global smartphone brands. They were launching smartphones with new and updated features every second or third month and were always engaged in some new innovations. If the Indian smartphone brand had shown even a little promptness then perhaps there would have been no need for me to make this Bolg today.
According to the data of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, there were 61 crore mobile users in India in the year 2022 and according to a projection, this number is going to increase to 150 crore by the year 2040. But the sad thing is that despite having so much opportunity, no Indian smartphone brand is able to make its place in this market and that too when our government has been supporting the country through initiatives like Make in India for the last many years.
It is trying its best to grow the manufacturing industry. We do not have a single global brand in the smartphone market and there are not one but multiple reasons behind this, the first reason of which is lack of innovation and research and development. Now friends, no matter what the technical industry is, if new technologies are not continuously discovered in it, then that industry is going to be left behind with time. Because no matter which country the customer belongs to, they are always excited to buy new things and want to keep themselves upgraded with time.
The same rule follows with smartphones also because if a smartphone company does not make innovations in its devices then customers are not motivated to buy its devices. For example, let us talk about 2007 when Apple launched its first iPhone. At that time it was the first product of its kind in the world, because Apple had launched a phone which had no buttons but only a screen. Now it is not that Apple was the first brand to make a touchscreen device, but Apple had innovated it to such a level that other companies were also forced to make devices to compete with the iPhone.
This was the reason that this phone started ruling people’s hearts as soon as it came and by the year 2012, Apple became popular for its iPhone all over the world. After which this company started selling lakhs of smartphones every day. Now friends you must have seen Recently, Samsung’s folding smartphones are becoming quite popular, which were first launched by them in 2019. Although the price of this phone is quite high but it is a new innovation in terms of technology and people are very excited to get it. Gradually, Samsung improved its technology and then after some time also launched flip phones with classic design.
As soon as this phone was launched, Samsung’s popularity among the people increased much more than before. Although other companies also tried to launch flip phones, it took them more than four years. In which Samsung completely dominated the flip phone market. From this you can guess that continuous innovation is a factor that plays an important role in keeping your brand in the top selling category. Now the question is that when this entire industry is based on innovation, then why is the Indian smartphone company so behind in innovation?
So actually the biggest reason behind this is having short term vision. Instead of spending money on R&D, Indian brands always gave priority to marketing and sales, which benefited them, but only for a short period of time. The second biggest reason for the decline of Indian smartphone brands is rebranding. Now friends, when brands like Apple and Samsung were trying to make their place in the world, at that time Micromax was silently importing and selling smartphones from China by tagging it as an Indian smartphone brand.
In fact, at that time almost all Indian brand managers were working on two types of business models. Either they used to source parts from countries like China and assemble them at their place or they used to directly order ready to used smartphones in bulk, rebrand them and sell those phones at their place. Now a major reason for re-branding was the lack of money among Indian brands. Now the setup of the manufacturing unit required investment in technology, infrastructure as well as labour. But Indian smartphone brands had very limited financial resources and it was very challenging for them to make big investments.
This was the reason why these brands kept a very short term vision and instead of building brand identity, they considered it better to source products from foreign manufacturers, sell them and earn commission. Now, initially his strategy proved to be very effective and he also got a lot of benefits. People bought heavily, due to which India became the world’s second largest smartphone market in terms of customers after China at that time. Now when the brands of foreign countries saw this, they were completely stunned.
China thought that Indian brands are earning so much profit by selling our own phones, then why don’t we sell our phones there ourselves and earn profit. And friends, with this thinking in mind, Xiaomi launched its three phones in India in July 2016 and as it had thought, it got tremendous results. After which, with time, apart from Chinese brands, other foreign brands also setup manufacturing units in India and started manufacturing their smartphones locally.
And friends, the amazing thing here was that on one hand, foreign brand phones were gaining popularity among the people, while on the other hand, Micromax was launching rebranded phones one after the other. Now whether you call it foolishness of Micromax or stupidity, I leave it to you to decide. Now friends, another big reason for the decline of Indian brands in the smartphone market is the highest margin taken by Indian brands.
Now you know that the smartphone market is very competitive and only those companies survive here which can sell their smartphones at low margins and cheap prices. While the Indian company kept its margin at 20 to 30 percent, the Chinese company, even after setting up a manufacturing unit, was selling its phones at a margin of only 5 to 6 percent. Due to low margins, Chinese brand smartphones were quite cheap for the people. And as I already told you, India was not able to compete with China in terms of features, due to which Indian brands gradually ceased to exist.
And friends, another major reason for the decline of Indian smartphone brands was the poor after sales support and service. Now Indian brands were importing smartphones from foreign countries and selling them in ready-to-use condition, but they had Baba Ji’s thullu in the name of service. If a customer’s phone broke or got damaged due to some reason, it would take months for him to get it repaired. At that time, once when a person gave his mobile phone for service, he was made to wait for the phone for six months and when he did not receive his phone even after six months, he filed a case against the company.
This company was Micromax, which had to pay ₹ 10,000 as fine to the person for waiting so long and due to this, people’s trust in these Indian companies started eroding. Now if we see, at that time how would these Indian brands even provide their services? These people used to get the phones from China due to which they neither had any major components nor had a factory and it was not possible for them to give a new phone in replacement because if they did so then they would start incurring losses. And friends, because of all these reasons, even today our country has failed to produce a global smartphone brand.
Anyway, see you again with the powerful explanation of the Success Story.
