On my short stint to India, again I had to go through the shock of the seeing the changes – that are so apparent to the person who does not live there. The changes are so pronounced in so many areas, starting from the inflation, the volume of the air travel, the consumer mind set, the crowd, the luxury cars, huge malls and indefinite line in all places. Even though the traditional stuffs such as posters on public places, eating in the corner of the streets, all around crowd at the movie theaters did not change a bit. I always wondered the logic of looking dark heroes and fair lady in the backdrop of a tiger and a burning helicopter starring at you from the movie posters.
Well my intention was not to talk about that – one another visible change- the proliferation of Mobile phones in the lives of the people. Even though this is a consistent pattern across the globe, the accessibility to the mobile phones and their usage is exponential in India. I started thinking about the future, a couple of years down the road. That take as us to an interesting and thought provoking topic.
No doubt that there is going to be some interesting dominance & business options going to open up in the mobile eco space a. In US, as we think of Apple and Samsung as the smartphones, on the contrary in India I saw a variety of cheap smartphones such as Micormax(18% of market share), Karbonn (18% of market share) in addition to Samsung (24%) have their footprint so steadily in these growing markets. Apple is still considered as a niche product and has less than 3% share in this market. These android based phones are cheap, fully featured, work good and priced extremely competitive.
I think the rise of these cheap smartphones over the next few years could make it much harder for companies like Samsung and Apple to hold their spots at the top. I also think there's a lot of room for another, more open operating system(s) to compete with Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
- Even though Apple was the first one to bring in their concept of smartphone with iPhone’s introduction, that was the first paradigm shift for the consumers - was moving from feature phones to smartphones.
- The second shift was the introduction of the purchasing feature with rich user experience - was the setting up of the app stores. Apple started it and now every manufacturer has their own app store.
- The third shift was on the form factors - the battle between moving from a 3- to 4-inch screen to a 5-inch screen. Now that everyone had nailed it.
Here is the prediction, the next major disruption is going to occur around the commoditization of hardware. Over the course of the next 3-5 years, it will impact every market on the planet. It’s mostly being felt now in emerging markets. The total population of approximately 3 billion people in India, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which constitutes approximately 41% of the world population.The reason it's being impacted there is because of the turnkey model. It allows these local OEMs to arise out of nothing.
The impact and change could get pretty bad pretty damn quick. This is often the case with the fast emerging technologies. Look what happened to Research In Motion (RIM). Look what happened to Nokia. When I googled, I found that last summer Micromax surpassed Samsung as the dominant feature phone player in India. We're talking literally in eight months this occurred.
This is just one market. We see this happen all over the world. We see these local kings, such asBlu Products in Latin America and Cherry Mobile in the Philippines. All of these guys are arising. They understand local marketing and distribution better than any incumbent that attempts to move into the region. These guys are hustlers; they're fast moving. They know what it takes to influence market dynamics.
I’m wondering where Apple & Google will be talking us. Or an unknown entity that might shift the dynamics. This type of the user base had never happened to any company in the world up until now. But if you're an operating system and you have a half a billion users or more, you can build a very unique interesting business. To be honest though, I think this will be the next step of evolution. It's this notion of an open computing platform that's going to capture the hearts and minds and where the innovation is going to occur.
I’m waiting!
