The Indian smartphone market, the telecom sector and more

 Well hello ladies and gentlemen, and to everyone reading. This is Sohil Bankar. A novice tech enthusiast from India. I am new to every aspect of blogging, let's see how this goes. I've no idea if this will be read anyone as I don't know how Blogger functions. But I like to talk tech, so here I go.

Today I feel like I need to talk about The Indian smartphone market, the telecom sector and more  

My first phone was from a company named Coolpad, it was a Chinese smartphone brand that's nowhere to be found as of now. I owned it for 2 years I suppose from 2014-2016 roughly. 2014 was a different time than today for Indian Smartphone markets. India was emerging, slowly but surely. There was no XIAOMI or JIO at that time.  It would take another year for JIO to come disrupt the telecom whole and sole and it would also take a year for Xiaomi to start becoming relevant. As I think the success of xiaomi is largely owed to JIO. When I bought my first smartphone, coolpad. Xiaomi had just entered the market and was figuring out the way India works. At that time, Micromax were busy rebranding Chinese phones and being notorious for bootlegging Chinese products, Perhaps this is why Chinese smartphone companies decided to enter India, Micromax might as well be the reason why they decided to enter India. Micromax might  have dropped an axe on their own foot. Owing to it's massive market share, even surpassing Samsung to be The No.1 Smartphone brand in India by just bootlegging Chinese brands. Doing that too, in a sub par manner. I remember Micromax smartphones to be incredibly buggy, bloated and the screen felt like it was not responsive at all at times. Maybe this is what China saw, they're copying our phones and it's a bad attempt at that. Why not just disrupt the market. And disrupt they did. 

With Jio entering In December 15th of 2015, I feel as if it's this moment The Indian smartphone and telecom markets were disrupted, COMPLETELY. I remember being charged 250 rupees per GB of 3G data, i was and still am a subscriber of a famous telecom operator. With Jio coming in with free data for almost a year, getting users hooked to the new found speeds and opportunities, it gained significant market share within months. Even after prices were introduced of Jio packs, people found it extremely cheap, the packs being unlimited calling packs and a 1 to 3 Gb pf data per day. 

This, marked a digital revolution in India and this is what put xiaomi on India's radar. The smartphones were feature packed at dirt cheap rates being 4G ready and being that cheap was a win win for Indian consumer. And one thing that India loves more than anything is a product that's cheap and good. That's what Xiaomi is, unbelievably cheap and surprisingly spec heavy. Other companies like Oppo and Vivo followed suit, with Oppo and Vivo marketing their products to the new Young India that just discovered the internet. Selfie focusing phones were the new thing for them, apart from of course being unbelievably affordable and spec heavy.

Well that was it, Indian companies famous for bootlegging like Micromax, Intex and Lava were NOWHERE to be found soon enough after the Chinese brands entered India. Xiaomi says it almost makes no money from it's hardware sale. that is selling phones isn't a profitable business for Xiaomi. It never was. What if I told you that Xiaomi isn't in the business of smartphones at all? What if Xiaomi just wanted to get it's devices out there. But why? Why'd they make almost no profit whatsoever from their smartphones and still be profitable? We'll discuss later on 😊