Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apple. Show all posts

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).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles

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Friday, December 07, 2012

Ask the right questions, of yourself!

If you’re not the apple of your boss’s eye, don’t sulk! Ask the right questions, of yourself!

If it’s the latter, solution could be simply trying to know your boss better and show some friendliness (not to be mistaken as sucking up). And, if it’s for real, then you need some introspection before reaction! “If someone comes to me with a problem, I always first tell him to introspect and see if the boss is really prejudiced or is there a method in the madness i.e. the person he favours actually has certain admirable strengths,” says B. Shankar, GM-HR, BHEL. It’s perhaps time to examine your own efforts (Are you as good as you think you are?!).

Just because you haven’t been told, doesn’t imply there’s no problem. Being less friendly could be his way of expressing disapproval. Talk it out and be open to criticism. Figure out the traits he really values. It could be these traits, in someone else, which make you call him unfair and biased… If this doesn’t help, you need to re-look at your work. If you like what you do and such preferential behaviour doesn’t affect your job potential, then putting up with such a boss by merely overlooking isn’t that bad an idea. Charging your boss with it would only lead to tension at work.

Managing your work is definitely a stated objective, but managing your boss is a primary unstated favour that you owe to yourself. So, if he’s low on EI, you might as well think a little on his behalf. Since he would rarely realise the impact of his decisions on your life, you may set the limit by making him realise it the next time he throws work at you when the day is about to get over! And, if your work is awaiting his approval, you may give him direction and structure, instead of silently getting angry at him.

By virtue of becoming a boss, a person comes under scrutiny, even when it’s not due. Maybe it is time to act and not judge him, for it’s likely that you may not be doing your ‘job’ i.e. thinking for him.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Google’s calculated gamble?

The acquisition of Motorola Mobility presents the strongest means at Google’s disposal to challenge Apple’s dominance. Whether Google can pull that off remains to be seen

As the boards of directors of Google and Motorola Mobility approved the $12.5 billion (or $40 per share) buyout of the latter by the former on August 15, 2011, the $3.1 billion purchase of online advertising firm DoubleClick, Google’s largest acquisition so far, was a thing of the past. And so was Google’s status as just a notable search engine giant. It was now a hardware manufacturer too, challenging its arch rival Apple more directly than its Android licensing programme allowed it to, especially in terms of a more tightly integrated multi-screen proposition.

Interestingly, Google also offered Motorola Mobility a significant reverse termination fee – a whopping $2.5 billion – to guarantee that it will remain committed to the deal. That’s around 20% of the total purchase price. Remove Motorola’s $3 billion in cash on hand from the purchase price, and the fee forms an eye-popping 26% of Google’s total consideration, way above the normal reverse termination fees, which usually run 4-10% of any given transaction. Further, Google is paying 63.5% more than Motorola Mobility’s closing price on the New York Stock Exchange on August 12, 2011. Considering that the average premium of more than 360 deals in the wireless-equipment industry on that basis was 32% in the past five years (Bloomberg data), it’s certainly big money that Google is paying for a company that has been struggling to remain profitable in recent months.

For information, Motorola Mobilty posted net losses of $81 million & $56 million in the first and second quarter of 2011. Moreover, while the global handset market has been growing at a smart pace (global mobile phone shipments rose 13% y-o-y in Q2 2011), Motorola has failed to keep up with the competition. In fact, in Q2, Motorola shipped just 10.6 million handsets (out of which 4.4 million were smartphones), as compared to its peak of 65 million handsets in Q4 2006.

The reason is clear. Google did not join hands with Motorola for its global handset reach or even brand equity for that matter as its current market share is less than 2.5%. The main reason for this historic deal is the recent legal context surrounding smartphone IP. In fact, Google’s deal for Motorola comes a month after it lost a bid to a consortium (which included Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson & Sony) for 6,000 patents from the Canadian Nortel. For Google, which faces an increasing number of patent infringement claims against its Android system, the loss was a major blow. Thus, the deal, which requires regulatory approval and is expected to close by the end of 2011 or early 2012, would give Google a quiver with more than 17,000 patents (with an additional 7,500 pending) that would help it defend Android OS from a barrage of patent lawsuits from its rivals. Besides this, Motorola Mobility is a leading maker of TV set-top boxes and the acquisition could stage a comeback for the troubled Google TV. Further, owning a handset manufacturer allows Google to better integrate software and hardware. No doubt, with the Motorola buyout, Google is trying to take a leaf out of Apple’s book by becoming more vertically integrated. But the question is, can it succeed?


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