In spite of being attacked from all corners, a faltering supply chain and negative sentiments soaring high among the local consumers, top Chinese smartphone brands gained market share during the most critical phase - the April-June quarter of this year.
If Naam was made today, there wouldn't even have been enough audiences to boo it out of the halls, observes Deepa Gahlot.
Apart from bringing new suppliers on board, Xiaomi is also hoping to take advantage of the newly launched PLI scheme that offers incentives on incremental production of smartphones with 2020 as the base year.
Qualcomm launched its new affordable, India-designed chipset, the Snapdragon 4s Gen 2, on Tuesday. This chipset will enable mobile device makers to sell 5G smartphones operating on a standalone (SA) network for Rs 8,300 or less.
Even as most manufacturers are still assessing the overall impact on their businesses, early projections suggest the market may grow at its lowest ever rate, in 2020.
'The world cannot remain a mute spectator. We could have televisions blowing up in our homes, smartphones blowing up in a gym or mobile phones blowing up on aircraft.' 'Our adversaries are not going to sit quiet. They have got an idea that they will encash to our detriment,' warns Vice Admiral Biswajit Dasgupta (retd).
The news of Dixon Technologies (India)'s tie-up with HP in addition to its existing Lenovo and Acer partnerships has led to a 5 per cent stock uptick since the start of the week. Dixon can target roughly 60 per cent of India's addressable IT hardware market with these contracts. Dixon targets Rs 48,000 crore in revenue from IT hardware under the PLI scheme over the next six years.
The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday cleared the Rs 13,180 crore project by Yuzhan Technology, part of Taiwan's Foxconn Group, at Kancheepuram. The unit is reportedly expected to assemble smartphone display modules, which will be one of the first such units to cater to Apple's growing presence in the country. The unit is expected to generate at least 14,000 jobs. Of the 14 existing manufacturing units in the Apple supply chain, seven are based in Tamil Nadu.
The industry is keeping a close watch to see if shuttered factories in China reopen in the coming days and supplies resume sometime this week.
The smartphone has become our buddy and we owe it a good insurance policy to ensure it's protected at all times, says Naval Goel
Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal's recent comments on large e-commerce players have reignited the debate about their impact on smaller offline retailers. On Wednesday, Goyal said that the rapid growth of e-commerce in India is a "cause for concern" and is diminishing the market share of small, mom-and-pop stores by offering high-margin products such as consumer electronics and apparel at discounted rates.
The government will investigate a claim that WhatsApp accessed the microphone of smartphone users while the phone was not in use, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on Wednesday.
Can the launch of smartphones under its own brand name by Finnish company HMD Global - despite having a licence to use the Nokia brand which it bought from Microsoft - help it regain its once dominant position in the mobile phone sweepstakes in India, where it was once routed? In 2009, Nokia was the country's largest MNC with revenues of $4 billion and a market share touching 80 per cent in 2010. After this, its fortunes fell. Although it had been the first global player to set up an assembly plant, not only to assemble phones for the local market but for exports, it had to shut down operations in 2014.
Sleep, brain power and all the things that your gadget may be taking from you.
The first half of the year (H1-2020) was marked by sluggish growth with demand down 26 per cent YoY, while the second half saw recovery. H2-2020 recovered with 19 per cent YoY growth, reports Shivani Shinde.
PC maker Lenovo India will start manufacturing 50,000 GPU-based AI servers in India next year, the company said on Tuesday. Besides this, Lenovo announced setting up its fourth largest research and development centre in Bengaluru. Lenovo India managing director Shailendra Katyal said that the company will make servers locally and also export them from its manufacturing unit in Puducherry.
Bengaluru-based Sunny Gupta had been searching for a laptop for months. In August, while sitting at a coffee shop, he decided to order an Acer Predator laptop - typically priced between Rs 95,000 and Rs 2.5 lakh - through the quick-commerce (q-com) platform Flipkart Minutes. "It took exactly 13 minutes from payment to receiving it at the Starbucks I ordered it to," he wrote in a now-viral post on social media platform X.
If growth reverts to the pre-Covid level, a lot of people may have to temper their rosy optimism, points out Debashis Basu.
While war rooms are set up closer to the sales, warlike preparations go into it almost 12 months in advance to ensure that on D-day the firm gives its best to its customers.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday said the company continues to engage closely with partner Jio on the initiative of building an affordable smartphone and that work is underway on the project. Last year, Google had picked up a 7.7 per cent stake in Jio Platforms for Rs 33,737 crore. It had also entered into a commercial agreement with Jio Platforms to jointly develop an entry-level, affordable smartphone.
In the coming weeks, online retailers are expected to further raise the pitch with shopping festivals, discounts, and cashback offers.
Considering the vehement anti-China stance across the nation after the Galwan incident of June 15/16, there was barely a squeal of outrage about the Dhoni-OPPO tie-up on social media, barring a couple of tweets.
At Rs 2,999, LYF Flame is one of the most affordable VoLTE smartphone in the market now.
Amid the protests against leading e-commerce firms, Flipkart and Amazon, shipments through the online route in fact witnessed a double-digit growth every quarter.
Security analysts say they have already seen all of the major online threats - Trojan horses, viruses, worms - spreading on smartphones, often through email attachments sent to the phones.
The much-delayed decadal census exercise and the work to update the National Population Register (NPR) are likely to begin early 2025 and the data will be declared by 2026, thus changing future census cycles completely, official sources said.
Premium mobile device maker Apple will start selling iPhone 16 series smartphones from September 20 onwards, sources aware of the development said. The company for the first time has plans to start assembling iPhone Pro Series in India but those models will start selling at a later date, the source said. "The entire iPhone 16 lineup will be available across the country tomorrow," an Apple India spokesperson said.
Battleground shifts to rural and small towns, where user base aspires to upgrade to smartphones.
This year will be the one when GenAI becomes a part of the daily lives of people around the world.
Targeted at fast growing low-cost smartphone markets like India, Nokia launched the much anticipated Android-based smartphones starting at Rs 7,600.
The filing of Swiggy's DRHP has led to direct comparisons with Zomato, which is a direct competitor in food delivery and the fast-growing quick-commerce segment where Blinkit (owned by Zomato) faces off against Instamart (and Zepto). In Q-commerce, Flipkart, Amazon, Reliance and Big Basket are all entering the space. All of them have deep pockets, hence competitive intensity will rise going forward.
British rock band Coldplay on Sunday added a third show to the Mumbai leg of its "Music Of The Spheres World Tour 2025" citing "phenomenal demand", hours after fans expressed disappointment over long virtual queues on the online ticket platform BookMyShow.
India has pipped China to drive the volume growth of smartphones in the world on the back of falling prices of high-end devices.
Is your phone your life? Samir Makwana lists out the best camera phones in the market.
The growth of Chinese manufacturers is shaking up the smartphone industry.
The onslaught of Chinese mobile brands is virtually obliterating Indian brands, especially in terms of value. According to industry estimates based on excise and Custom duty trends, the value share of Indian brands (across smartphones and feature phones, operator phone sales - which is mostly Jio phones - and the value of phones smuggled into the country) has dropped to a mere 1.2 per cent in January-October 2021 compared to 25.4 per cent in the calendar year 2015. In the same period, the Chinese have established their domination, hitting a value share of 64.5 per cent, up from 17.8 per cent.
The highest-ever goods and services tax (GST) evasion has been done by the online money gaming industry.
Trends like bundled offers and 4G-LTE feature phones could become mainstream in 2018
All borders of the national capital will be sealed for the entry of commercial and heavy vehicles by Thursday midnight apart from heavy police deployment, they said.
Beware! It can hurt relationships and make you unhappy!
