A citizenship test for India's smartphone space

As tensions between India and China escalate, Chinese smartphone brands—which control over 80% of the market—are looking to bolster their Indian credentials. Their rivals are looking to ride the anti-China wave back into relevance

Vandana, 6 Jul 2020

Chinese brands account for four of every five Indian smartphones. But India’s border stand-off with China, followed by a ban on Chinese apps, has them spooked

They are now trying hard to prove their Indian credentials. This could result in them bringing their component ecosystem to India

Domestic brands also sniff an opportunity to return to their halcyon days of 2014, when Micromax ruled the roost

The real gainer, though, could be Samsung, which is already aggressively pushing to make up ground on Chinese market leader Xiaomi

On 21 May, in the wake of a series of border skirmishes between China and India, Chinese electronics major Xiaomi quietly added a new page to its Indian website. Titled ‘Made in India’, the page does its best to paint Xiaomi, the country’s best-selling smartphone brand, as an Indian success story.

It touts the scale of Xiaomi’s manufacturing in India, the number of Indians it employs, and its Indian investments, including social media platform ShareChat. It goes further still, highlighting the company’s philanthropic activities in the country. These include donations to the families of martyred soldiers and the PMCares fund set up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help fight Covid-19.

AUTHOR

Vandana

Vandana is based in Delhi. She covers vertically focussed startups in consumer internet space and also writes on travel tech and smartphones for The Ken. She has spent 13 years in journalism covering a wide range of subjects- equity markets, mutual funds to education and skilling, working at organisations such as Business Standard, CNBC TV18 and The Week in the past.

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