Customer is king

It is a matter of national pride that low-cost Indian smart-phone maker Micromax has overtaken Samsung in the Indian market by shipping more phones in the fourth quarter of 2014. The budget conscious Indian may have triumphed. It is a similar story in China where Xiaomi sells more than Samsung and Apple in the smart-phone segment, which is the biggest growth market worldwide as feature phones lose ground.

While Samsung disputes the methodology of calculating sales versus number of phones shipped, some analysts are convinced that the Indian manufacturer, who, curiously, is not a publicly listed company, has stolen a march over the Koreans who had once displaced Silicon Valley’s Apple as the biggest seller in this category.

The mobile phone has become such an essential part of modern life that the smart phone now represents only a small aspirational step upwards when the developing world is becoming the biggest marketplace.

Whatever the truth of the numbers, it is clear that the Korean firm is facing its biggest challenge since it became the world’s biggest smart-phone seller a few years ago, displacing Apple, but which regained ground last quarter with the launch of its latest bigger-sized phones. With Apple, more prosperous customers may be buying a lifestyle product even more than the utility value of the device, but the fact remains that the smart Indian knows where to get more for less.