Why doesn’t Mukesh Ambani explore the feasibility of manufacturing quality Smart phones with rock-bottom prices?
Let me share something about Boycott China and its effect on Chinese smartphone sales in India -
Though people may trend about Boycott Chinese products in Twitter, Instagram or any other social platform but most people do the exact opposite.
(Note:- I don’t encourage the idea of Boycotting any products nor I’m criticizing the people who buy it. Because it is purely their choice, people buy what they want.)
Did you get it? India is a price-sensitive market so who offers good value for the product at a good price will occupy the market. Chinese smartphone makers do that exactly — Good products at an affordable price.
If we look at other options other than Chinese then they are: Samsung, Asus, Nokia, LG, iPhone, Sony, Pixel, Panasonic, HTC and Blackberry.
Out of 10 only 4 Non-Chinese brands in the budget and mid-range smartphone category. They are: Samsung, Asus, Nokia, LG.
Out of these brands Samsung is launching smartphones with a better value, though it doesn’t beat the Chinese brands in overall specs to price value. Remaining Non-Chinese brands are premium brands, so I’m excluding them because most customers lie in budget and mid-range category.
That’s the reason why Chinese smartphone brands didn’t lose market in India even after Border issues. They did lose some market share but it is due to the ongoing pandemic and don’t forget whole smartphone shipments in India dropped by 51% due to the same.
India is a price-sensitive market then why don’t Mukesh Ambani explore the feasibility of manufacturing quality Smart phones with rock-bottom prices?
This is the right question.
Actually he did try. Remember Lyf smartphones? They launched lyf smartphones at the right moment when he announced “Free Jio Sim and Free Data”. They did sell some smartphones with good amount of marketing but still they fell short to these Chinese smartphone manufacturers.
But now Jio is not the same like earlier with the likes of Qualcomm and Google investing a lot of money in the company. Jio announced that they will be launching a 5G phone with the help of Google, but I highly doubt if that phone is a smartphone or a featured phone similar to Jio phone.
Why doesn’t Mukesh Ambani explore the feasibility of manufacturing quality Smart phones with rock-bottom prices?
Even I have the same doubt, Why? The possible reasons could be:
- Experience — Jio never manufactured smartphones before. Yes, you read that right. Even Lyf phones are imported from other countries. Lack of experience it may not be a piece of cake for them to compete in the hot and busy smartphone business.
- Manufacturing — If a company doesn’t have manufacturing units then it is quite hard to think about making smartphones not even assembling smartphones.
- Even if they want to sell smartphones then all they have to do is give the contract to the manufacturer, import them and sell here which is the same strategy used by Lava, Micromax, Xolo, etc. We saw this story before.
As I said with Qualcomm, Google and other companies are partnering with Jio. So we have no idea what will happen in the future. But in my view it looks like Jio is concentrating on Offline stores, Carrier Network and IOT products more than manufacturing smartphones competing the Chinese brands.
