Indian Smartphone brand loosing home market

Indian smartphone brands are expanding all over the world but they are losing their footing in the home market. And after GST the Indian smartphone manufacturers will continue to get incentives as the government assures them full support.

The GST council at present has fixed the rate on handsets at 12%, which will raise the price of smartphones by 4-5%. It will definitely affect domestic manufacturing and the government will need to continue incentive for locally manufactured mobile phones to further push the domestic manufacturing ecosystem. An assurance has however been given by the government to the handset industry that manufacturing in India will continue to be incentivized even under the new GST regime.

At the same time foreign brands are making strategies to maximum growth. The Chinese brand iTel is disrupting the other half of the market (feature phones) by climbing to the number two position in the overall mobile phones market for the first time.

iTel, which is also the number one mobile brand in Africa is now leveraging its successful low-cost strategy, effective distribution and scale to grow in the India market. The BBK Electronics-owned Chinese handset brands VIVO and OPPO are relying heavily on sports to penetrate into its targeted segment, which is the youth in India, according to Vivek Zhang, chief marketing officer, Vivo India.

The companies were founded separately and compete against each other. Certain aggressive strategies done by the mobile phone vendors like GIONEE play with “Battery and Selfie”,  OPPO sells on “Selfie Expert” and Vivo focuses on “camera and music”.