Chinese Dominance in the Indian Smartphone Market
Created on 29 Jan 2020
Wraps up in 3 Min
Read by 3.8k people
Updated on 10 Sep 2022
India’s Becoming a BBK Territory! BBK Electronics now holds more than 40% market share in Indian smart phone market! What did BBK Electronics do to achieve this? How are the Chinese capturing the Indian Smartphone Market? Read and Find out below.
If we tell you that smartphones of BBK Electronics are loved by Indians, you might not believe us. But, as per a data, these smartphones have captured a lion’s share in Indian smartphone market! Yes, that’s true. We’re talking about Oppo, Vivo, Realme and OnePlus.
All these brands belong to the same company! Besides this, these brands have collectively taken over Xiaomi last year to become the market leader in India. So, they own more than 40% market share in India. It’s quite possible that you might also be reading this newsletter on a phone manufactured by BBK electronics.
How and When did this Start?
It was 2014 when Vivo and OnePlus forayed into the Indian market. An year later, Oppo entered. By the way, Xiaomi also entered India in the year 2014 and gained almost instant success. Xiaomi is known as the ‘Apple of China’ and had entered the Indian market with an exclusive tie-up with Flipkart. For a certain period of time, Xiaomi’s phones were not even available offline. So, this started a trend.
The trendsetter was later trailed as BBK electronics entered the Indian market. Although Xiaomi always had and will have the ‘first mover advantage’ but, the way BBK electronics captured the market is phenomenal. It offered the right thing at the right time, and the result is what we see now. BBK’s brands focused more on the offline market and still continue to dominate in that space.
The Sad Story of Indian Brands
Do you even remember that there used to be brands called Micromax, Lava and others? The reason that they are no more there is sheer domination of Chinese brands over the Indian market. Also, the Chinese companies did what they always do best - they offered the commodity at throwaway prices.
Now, as we all know that we Indians are price sensitive and anything that’s cheap is good enough for us. So, we again fell for the trap laid by Chinese brands and as a result, Indian brands perished. We bought Chinese smart phones at such pace that now we are the second biggest market for smart phones in the world, only after China! (US used to be at the second place till recently we took over)
Another reason for the failure of Indian smart phone brands was their inability to update the technology. Now, technological update requires research and then funds. Since, Indian market did not respond very well to the inception of Indian smart phone brands, they couldn’t update their technology and soon became obsolete.
Conclusion
Indian market has always fallen prey to cheap stuff offered by Chinese companies. We do not understand that they over-produce heavily and dump their extra sub-standard stuff in the Indian market to first capture the market and then throw the Indian brands/companies out of their own market. And, then after some time when Indians get used to their products, they start minting money.
At that time, we price sensitive Indians do not mind paying more to those same companies because by that time we’ve acquired the experience offered by them. In all this, Indian companies suffer the most and even projects like ‘Make in India’ can not do anything about it.
We need to understand that this is our country and we make a strong market for the world. If we realize our own strengths and think of leveraging them strategically, only then we would help the Indian economy to grow otherwise, Chinese companies will keep taking advantage of our market and we’ll be silent spectators of our economic declination.
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