Smartphone Market In India (Part 1: Rise Of Indian Companies)

In the early years (2009-2010) when smartphone was relatively a new thing for India there were only the big companies such as Apple, Samsung etc who were selling smartphones in the market. But their smartphones were too expensive. People in India were not tempted to buy those phones because of high prices. People were not bothered to jump ship to a smartphone from their existing regular feature phone.

Then came the new players in the arena such as Micromaxx, Karbon, Spice etc which were Indian companies. These companies started selling smartphones at ridiculously cheap prices and started getting the attention of the Indian market. Due to low prices of the phones people started to buy the phones from these companies. These phones were not of top notch quality and in performance didn't even come close to performance offered by phones made by Apple, Samsung etc. These phones had terrible display, weak processors and poor servicing offered by the company. But people ignored all that and had only one point in their mind, these phones were so cheap that you could buy 5-10 of those in price of 1 iphone or any other flagship phone present at that time. These phones started selling like hotcakes and were a massive hit in the country.

This was the the actual starting point of the smartphone revolution in India. Before this people used feature phones which rarely had internet facilities and which were just used for calling facilities. But after the arrival of cheap smartphones offered by Indian companies almost every middle class family had one.

These Indian companies were getting so big that almost everyone in the country could recognise them. These companies started sponsoring all the major sports tounaments such as IPL, football leagues also the cricket world cup .One company named Micromaxx was becoming such a behemoth in the Indian smartphone market that they hired hollywood actor Hugh Jackman to be their brand ambassador for their phones.

These companies were making huge profits from smartphone sales and no one with the right mind would have thought these companies could ever fall.

With huge smartphone sales in the Indian market it started getting the attention of companies from other countries, particularly China and what happened next was totally unexpected. (to be continued)

This is a multipart article, stay tuned for the next part