'Big festival demand to drive smartphone sales' - Times of India

The market for smart mobile devices continues to boom despite the economic slowdown. Samsung, the top mobile phone maker in India, introduced the Note 3 smartphone at Rs 49,900 and the Galaxy Gear smart watch at Rs 22,990 and is expecting robust demand for these products. Vineet Taneja, country head for Samsung's mobile & IT division, says the upcoming festival season should bolster demand. The domestic economy is going through tough times. How do you see the market now for your industry? We firmly believe that every market is a growth market as long as we have innovation. The reality is that when we compare ourselves t o where we were 10 years ago, the slowdown might be there in percentage terms. But, we also have a base of consumers whose wallets are yet to be tapped. They can provide us with sufficient growth. What makes your industry so bullish? How is it grim? Flights are full, there are no rooms in hotels. It is a lot better today than in the nineties. Then the situation was much worse. How is Samsung placed here. Are you facing any pressure? We are not facing any slowdown at all because of our portfolio and the huge tailwind that is there in the industry from the smartphone perspective. We played our strategy right by focusing on this area. Demand is coming from across all segments. What is the share of smartphones in mobile phone sales? In value terms, 65-70% of industry revenue is provided by smartphones. Their overall monthly size is around Rs 3,000 crore. We are roughly 50% of this. What about competition? We have not lost market share in terms of value or volume. But, you have to constantly innovate, constantly fill up all gaps. As a market leader, we make sure that we are present across portfolios. That we do not just play at high-end, or mid-end, or at low-end. We have to play across categories. We have to keep our eyes and ears to the ground. This industry is not for the faint-hearted because what is true today cannot be true tomorrow. So, you have to constantly be on the lookout and make smart moves. You can't predict what will happen even three months down the line. In terms of competition, the fight has always been there. We fear everything and are constantly paranoid. You cannot take anybody lightly in the market. You can't become arrogant. If you can't imagine the next innovation, you have to learn to follow it quickly. How do you see demand in the festival season? We are expecting very good response. Thanks to the monsoon, we are expecting good demand during the festival period. Is the market for smartphones only in the metros? The structure of the market is such that the top 10 towns for any high-end product or category will contribute about 40-50%. But, the reality is also that the other part is also growing equally rapidly. The next tier towns are also quite important. For example Wardha, a 50,000 population town outside Nagpur, sells our S4 and S3 devices in decent numbers, but may be not as much as Gurgaon. We are now waiting for the next revoluton when vernacular languages kick in. If a trader in Gujarat can have an app where he can track commodity prices in Gujarati, I think he will buy these phones. That is the next level of growth we will see in smart devices. Will local apps play a key role? Till recently, a lot of apps were in English. So now, we are promoting the vernacular app ecosystem. In languages, we started a big innovation where the entire user interface of phones can be had in 9-11 local languages. This covers almost 90% of the population. The moment user interface changes, they can do various things and the device's utility increases. And, if you can feed this with local apps, then there is a huge opportunity. We are working with local app developers and spending a lot of money in this. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHi4UcRqGvxjm0ggDaOc5jY230bMg&url=http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/gadgets-special/Big-festival-demand-to-drive-smartphone-sales/articleshow/22678589.cms

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