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Thread: The Rise and Fall of Indian Smartphone Companies

So, let's begin: (1/n)

There was a time in mid-2014 that Indian companies were in the lead of the smartphone market but suddenly one by one they disappeared. (2/n)

So how it all happened and the reasons why Chinese take over the Indian smartphone market. These two points are just like two sides of the coin. (3/n)

The era of Indian smartphone companies almost started in 2011, when Android was booming. (4/n)

There were Indian companies like Micromax, Lava, Intex, Karbonn, I-ball which were mainly manufacturing the feature phones, that were popular in tier-2, tier-3 cities and rural areas. (5/n)

They all started by manufacturing different products like feature phones (Micromax, Lava, Karbonn)/ speakers (Intex)/ computer accessories (I-ball, Intex) and then tried their luck in the Smartphone industry. (6/n)

As we know Android was new in 2011. The majority of people were using feature phones in India at that time. So, the Indian smartphone market was having a very nice potential to grow as compared to European or American market. (7/n)

So, they all started by manufacturing the android smartphones in series like Micromax made Canvas (Infinity, Spark, Amaze etc) series. (8/n)

Similarly Index made Infie and Indie series and again similarly other companies also made some smartphone series by following HTC (in 2011-2013 HTC was top Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer). (9/n)

They were targeting the budget-oriented smartphones up to 12000 INR, as most of the Indians were using the feature phones and wanted to shift to Android as it was having better features like a touch screen (compared to feature phones). (10/n)

So, this companies turned into smartphone manufacturer (not exactly but a kind of trading company, we will talk about it soon). (11/n)

They were having favourable conditions in the market and the unsaturated market of India having very huge potential accepted these companies. (12/n)

Because of the price factor, if people want to buy a smartphone than they choose to pay 7000 INR to these companies rather than paying 15000-25000 INR to Samsung, HTC, Nokia etc. (13/n)

So, because of these circumstances in the market, these companies got exponential growth. (14/n)

In just one-year (2010-11) Micromax became among the top 5 smartphone manufacturers securing #3 position having 6.9% of market share just by the end of one year is a great achievement for any Indian smartphone company. (15/n)

The numbers got bigger and bigger by year and to that extent that Micromax became #1 smartphone manufacturer by having about 20% market share and got #10 globally. Similarly, Karbonn got #3 with approx 9.6% market share in India. (16/n)

But how they became among the top 5 this process is very crucial because they were not doing any innovation in their smartphone. (17/n)

Many of you are not knowing that when Micromax was established (in year 2000), they were distributer company for Hp, Dell products. So here they played the same thing as a trading company thinks. (18/n)

They went to China and they approached Chinese companies and just rebranded it to Micromax, packed in Micromax box and the whole thing was dumped in India. (19/n)

Other companies like Lava, Karbonn, Intex did the same thing, as they were knowing the fact that there cheaply priced smartphone will be sold out as the public wanted cheap priced android smartphone. (20/n)

So, as we discussed they were not having any research and development facilities, this means NO INNOVATION and in the tech field, if you have to be stable as a company then innovation is the key to success. (21/n)

Rather than setting up an R&D facility, they focused on the marketing of their product more. And on that time, there were Chinese companies offering great phones at a decent price but these were not operating in India. (22/n)

But in July,2014 no Indian company was expecting the entry of big Chinese brands like Xiaomi (Apple of China), One plus. (23/n)

So Chinese companies like Xiaomi and Oneplus launched their first smartphone which was 4G itself, while other companies at that time were running on 2G/3G (big companies like Samsung, Nokia were operating on 3G mostly). (24/n)

This thing leads to the fall of Indian companies as they were not prepared for the shift from 3G to 4G at this speed. (25/n)