Opinion Too many connections

In the past few months,I have seen phones with e-books,speakers that are large enough to crack mirrors,phones meant for bikers,phones for Ferrari enthusiasts and what not. The companies have started vying for eyeball with gimmicks which might to exactly add to your calling abilities. The latest phone that I saw had a projector in-built. Why? You might ask. Well,I too have no clue.

But is anyone actually buying these phones? It seems the highly price-sensitive rural India is lapping up these new brands and their cheap Chinese imports. Who cares if you get the features of an iPhone for the price of its earphones. Most of these companies have no production facilities and hardly any post-sales service. Their USP is their ability to get to the Indian market the cheapest Chinese phones – often the very ones which were banned for not have EMIE numbers — at the lowest margins. Often their value addition to these phones is limited to the marketing and packaging. It helps that good phone software are available for free and saves their buyers the trouble of having to learn Mandarin to call your cousin next door.

But this is a business model that works. For some of the new brands have started selling more units than their bigger competitors who have dominated the market for long. A study,the credentials of which I am not very sure about,even puts one of the lesser known brands in the No 2 slot.

This also explains why most of the new launches by the biggies have been in the lower priceband,while making sure that they still cram in as many features as they can. But we could be heading for a consolidation. The real sales numbers over a longer period will tell which of these companies go on to make it big and which of them end up as a missed call.