Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Will they be Good at Crossing ‘Tablets’?

A number of low cost Giants are Preparing to launch tablets in India, Motivated by the way The Mobile Phone landscape changed in The Country. Is an Encore as Certain as expected

First there were desktops. Then there were laptops. Then there came mobiles. Indeed these devices made life simpler. But then, as smart phones, netbooks, media PCs, smartbooks, mobile internet devices and now tablets have come into the picture, life is not necessarily easier, neither for companies nor customers. For innovator companies like Apple, which rejuvenated the tablet segment in the first place, the challenge is to be able to milk innovation fast enough before competitors bring in substitutes and disrupt their pricing structure. Within a short span of launch of the iPad, competitors like HP, Blackberry, Dell, Samsung, HTC and Asus came into the fray.

Simultaneously, there are a host of Asian players who are looking to grab the opportunities in this new gold mine, and India will be very firm on their radar. After all, a precedent was set for them when Nokia suffered deep cuts in its market share from 60% in 2008 to around 31.5% by the quarter ending September 2010, thanks to players like Micromax, Lava & G’Five, who enhanced the value proposition by many times.

Now these players are set to enter the emerging tablet PC market in India with a price tag less than Rs.15,000. Delhi-based Lava Mobiles is on the verge of introducing its affordable tablet PC by September this year, which will be priced between Rs.15,000 and Rs.20,000. Micromax has plans to launch a tablet somewhere in July. Though initially these tablets might sound a bit expensive, prices will most likely fall. According to report released by the Boston Consulting Group titled ‘Swimming against the tide’, competition will drive down prices of affordable tablet PCs to Rs.9,000 by 2013. This is reaffirmed by S. N. Rai, Director and Co-founder, Lava Mobiles, as he exclaims, “Once our range of Tablet PCs is launched, we will keep working on the innovation side and therefore expect that the price will come down further to sub Rs.10,000 levels.” Zen, Olive, G’Five, Acer and Fly are expected to make their launches soon. But will customers, who pay for sub-Rs.5000 mobiles, show the same response to sub-Rs.15,000 tablets from these companies? According to Arshit Pathak, MD, G’Five, “Tablets from Apple and BlackBerry will be an add on for people who already own a laptop and/or a smartphone, but our product will be an independent device and will target people who don’t have any computing system.” They will look at students, SMEs & young professionals who wish to remain connected, have a better multimedia experience and don’t wish to spend on a notebook or a smart phone.

When the phenomenon called the Apple iPad took over the computing world last year in March, the immediate result was a fall in netbook shipments. In the nine months ending December 31, 2010, Apple sold 15 million iPads globally. Gartner estimates worldwide media tablet sales to touch 54.8 million units in 2011, up 181% from 2010, and surpass 208 million units in 2014. In fact, a recent study conducted by Accenture titled ‘Finding growth: Emergence of a new Consumer Technology Paradigm’ states that “while the growth rate of computers is expected to decline, the growth rate of tablet PCs is expected to be up by 160% in 2011”.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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