After Selfie Cameras, Where’s the Big Buck in Smartphones?

By Krishna Mukherjee

Way back in 2014, two Chinese smartphone brands—Oppo, Vivo, having the same parent, landed in India. In a span of three years, together, today, they hold about 23% market share. Unlike the fly-by night players or the Indian brands, which exuded a lot of confidence in their distribution strategies, these brands burnt a lot of money in their aggressive marketing campaign. Oppo’s selfie cameras became the trendsetter for the youth and caught a lot of attention. At the same time, Vivo played hard to strengthen its distribution networks, totally via offline mode.

Of course, their deep pockets helped in eating up market share from the Indian players, but now the question is about maintaining sustainability.

Once selfie camera, and money muscles became passé, where will the next big buck come from?

Handset makers today are brainstorming on the next big trend that is going to hit the market very soon.

Keeping in mind the fact that the way we Indians drain their phones, the next trend would be about offering the heaviest batteries.

In Q1, 2017, around 4.6 million smartphones were shipped embedded with more than 4000 mAh capacity of batteries, up from 1.6 million in the first quarter of 2016.

With Xiaomi, Lenovo, Samsung topping the chart of providing heaviest batteries.

Some of the models being Xiaomi Mi Max, Redmi 3S, Redmi Note 4, Redmi 3S, Asus Zenfone 3 Max, Gionee A1, Coolpad Note 5, Lenovo Phab2, Vibe P1, LG X Power among others.

However, when it comes to providing a capacity of over 5000 mAh capacity only six players are in the fray—Asus, Samsung, Itel, ZTE, Nubia, Lenovo, with shipments standing at around 0.2 million.

Some of the models being Asus Zenfone 3S, Zenfone Max, Samsung Galaxy A9 Pro, Itel PowerPro, ZTE Blade A2, Nubia A2, Lenovo P2, etc.

And on the top of it, affordability does not seem to be an issue with most of them falling within the price bracket of Rs 10K-15K.

No doubt about the fact that the next war would be around batteries, with brands like Panasonic, Gionee already betting big around batteries and having plans in the pipeline to launch mobile devices with heaviest batteries this year.

However, one more thing that would matter most is providing digital experience.

Huawei, which holds a very small chunk of the handset market, is all out to impart digital literacy to the consumers. It has plans to provide digital experience in about 30,000 stores, mostly in tier-1 cities, and on the back of it, the company targets to hold about double-digit market share by next year.

But the fact is the handset vendors need to experiment at every juncture and understand the nerve of insatiable consumers who always call for more.

(Krishna Mukherjee is Telecom Analyst at CMR)