If Xiaomi and BBK electronics capture entire India’s smartphone market then is that a threat to India?

If we have a look at the Indian smartphone market share as of Q2 2020, then we can observe that most of the market share is occupied by BBK Electronics subsidiaries (37%) — (Vivo, Oppo, Realme) and Xiaomi (29.4%).

On the whole Chinese brands — BBK Electronics and Xiaomi occupy more than 66.4% of Indian smartphone market share.

Note:- I said more than 66.4% because we have no idea what is the market share of OnePlus and IQOO (which are also subsidiaries of BBK Electronics) and Huawei + Honor.

Let’s change the question -

Will Xiaomi and BBK Electronics capture entire India’s smartphone market?

Answer is No. Around 30% of market share is occupied by non-Chinese brands including Samsung. These Chinese brands somehow managed to occupy the big chunk of the market but the remaining part is hard to occupy due to the strong contender — Samsung.

Samsung has a good brand value in India due to its presence since a long time. Before these Chinese brands entered the market, Samsung had a big hold of the Indian market but later it lost the market share but it is the only brand that has a good grip on the market even after the explosion of the Chinese brands.

At that time Samsung didn’t had good smartphones in the market except S & Note series. So recently they changed their strategy and started offering smartphones with good specs (not great). Thus Samsung has a significant share even today. Even if this continues, they can still manage to hold good grip.

Samsung’s large customer base is India and recently they shut their smartphone business in China because Samsung lost total market share in China and that is the main reason why Samsung shifted its manufacturing plant to India.

So I don’t think Xiaomi and BBK Electronics alone will occupy the whole Indian market share because of Samsung and even Samsung may not give a chance to due to its failure in China.

Note that this Anti-Chinese or Boycott Chinese sentiment will not work because India is a price-centric market and these Chinese brands are good at that. So we shouldn’t complaint about that nor expect someone to buy Non-Chinese products because value to price is what we should respect and we will.

Coming to the question — Is this a threat to India?

let’s assume that they still occupy a good chunk of the market.

So, Will that be a threat to India or Indian customers?

Absolutely Yes.

If you are hearing a lot about Chinese smartphone brands and their backdoor data stealing news these days and not aware of these then you are too late.

Yes, the allegations are True regarding all the backdoor data breaching by the Chinese brands. This is not new, there are so many instances where government agencies or research analysts reported the same i.e. Personal data is being sent to Chinese servers.

Here are some events in India -

1. In 2014, IAF (Indian Air Force) warned its officials and members to not use Xiaomi smartphones.
2. In 2015, GData (internet security organization) and Kryptowire reported that Chinese brands (Xiaomi, Lenovo and Huawei) had spying malware which is pre-installed in their smartphones.
3. In 2017, India banned 42 apps (for Army personals) and told our soldiers to format their smartphones due to links to Chinese servers.
4. All these apps are part of the 59 apps banned by the Indian government recently.
5. In 2017, the Indian government sent notice to 21 Chinese brands regarding the malware and data privacy and asked details of the data they collect.
6. And the response from these brands is that they collect and store the information securely.
7. Last year a twitter user noticed that Oxygen OS is sending data (phone number, IMEI number, apps used) to the Chinese servers.
8. (Other than India) Huawei was banned by USA in 2012 from selling networking equipment.
9. Last year Huawei smartphones were banned by the US government for privacy issues.
10. And so on…….

Apart from these there are so many other events which reports the same. The interesting thing is that each company has at least one allegation report on them.

User data, data breach is a privacy concern. For normal people like us this is not an issue because they collect this information and sell this data to other companies that will advertise their products based on our behavior, search history, etc.

But for military personals, politicians, Businesspersons or executives data theft is a serious concern. Military data is national security, so it is a worrying concern.

This raises one question — Are Chinese smartphones the only threat?

Most of the electronic parts are manufactured in China and in our daily life we encounter them even if we don’t want to. So with these reports we have no idea if it is a concern or not?

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