The competition in the smartphone industry is getting more and more onerous with each passing day. Ten years back, the Indian smartphone market was ruled by one company, Nokia, but today it has dropped out of sight from the market, due to lack of innovation.
In today’s fast paced world, the only thing that works for all the companies, especially in the smartphone market is continuous innovation. In other words, how successful you are is equally commensurate to the amount of innovative ideas you can think of and implement. We heard a few days back that Apple Inc. earned a whopping $18 billion profit in the most recent quarter. The main reason behind this second to none performance was Apple’s determination to offer the most innovative smartphones to its customers. Due to this, Samsung, Apple’s biggest rival couldn’t even come close to its performance.
Over the last few years, Samsung played a waiting game and followed what Apple did. Fortunately, it worked for the company in the past, but not this time. It witnessed a fall not only in overseas market, but in the Indian smartphone market as well.
According to a research conducted by Canalys, Samsung couldn’t manage to hold its leading position in the Indian market after a poor show in the most recent quarter. The budget smartphone company Micromax overtook Samsung. When reporters got in touch with the representatives of Samsung Electronics Ltd., they said that Samsung has not lost its position in the Indian market. The company said that it managed a market share of 34.3 percent during the previous quarter, which was good enough to prove its dominance in the Indian smartphone industry.
Canalys stated in its report published on February 3 that Micromax led the race with 22 percent smartphone sales in India during the fourth quarter of the previous year. Samsung, on the hand, could only manage 20 percent share in smartphone sales in India.
According to the company’s marketing Vice President, Asim Warsi, “The report published by Canalys takes into consideration smartphones shipment while Samsung takes into account total retail sales.” He further added that Samsung had a manufacturing unit in India; hence, chances of mismatching shipment couldn’t be sidelined completely.
Even though Warsi pointed out Samsung‘s retail sales numbers, he did not mention the percentage of smartphones manufactured in India. If rumors are to be believed, Samsung manufactures 90% of smartphones that are sold in India locally; a fact that contradicts his statement to a great extent.
In the midst of all these confounding arguments and claims, what does clearly emerge is that that Samsung has not been able to retain its dominance in the market lately. At a time when new players are continually entering the fray, if Samsung wants to be the topmost player in the game once again, it should shift its focus back towards innovation and not allow itself to get consumed by the number game.
Bhupendra Sharma
Image Source: [The Viewspaper]