(Image: Xiaomi)
Having fought one particularly ferocious border war in 1962, and tangled over numerous other border incidents in just this decade alone, Indian-Chinese relationships are never less than testy at any given time.
Given that China is Pakistan's ally, while India is host to the Dalai Lama, head of the Tibetan government in exile, which set up shop in the Indian mountain town of Dharamshala in the state of Himachal Pradesh in the 1950s, there is no love lost between these neighbours. Plus, China is forever trying to expand and exert its influence in India's backyard in areas like Burma and Sri Lanka, which drives India bananas.
While both nations will dictate much of what the world buys and sells, thanks to their low-cost manufacturing or service bases and gigantic consumer populations, and are often referred to in the same breath when talking about the economies of the future, the truth is that despite its vaunted legions of engineers and managers, India is hardly in the same league as China, thanks to its breathtakingly corrupt political system. India today is where China was 25 years ago. It used to be a hobby for Indians to constantly size their country up in comparison to their neighbor, but as of late, I have noticed that this doesn't happen as much anymore, perhaps because of a growing realisation of how far apart that gulf is. Still, there's no love lost between both nations.
This is why the sheer frenzy with which we Indians have embraced smartphone maker Xiaomi, or "the Apple of China", is astonishing. Maybe this says something about how Indians can separate their buying habits from their politics. And maybe there is enough realization that since practically everything we buy, from flat-screen TVs to computers to air conditioners to power plant turbines, is made in China, buying a Chinese brand isn't such a big deal. Or maybe it is just the sheer jaw-dropping value proposition Xiaomi offers that makes Indians forget about being nationalistic or patriotic and opting for an Indian brand like Micromax. The fact is that Indians haven't quite embraced a phone brand like they have Xiaomi.
(Image: Xiaomi)
Xiaomi launched its flagship Mi 3 two months ago to a roaring response — 95,000 phones were snapped up in a matter of seconds through six flash sales over a month, exclusively via e-commerce site Flipkart. That's no surprise when you consider the terrific specs that the good-looking Mi 3 sports: A 5-inch 1080p display, a robust 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB Internal memory, as well as a 13MP rear- and 2MP front-facing shooter, all for the bargain basement price of a little over $200.
If these specs at the given price — around $250 cheaper than even the value-driven Nexus 5 and an infinitely better proposition than the similarly priced, uber-popular Moto G — weren't enough to make Indians drool, Xiaomi has been accused by its critics of very cleverly suppressing sales of its phones at around a tenth of the existing demand for it. Former vice president at Google and current VP-International at Xiaomi, Hugo Barra told the Economic Times that this wasn't premeditated. The problem lies in India's unusual hardware and antenna calibrations, which are different from those existing in any other country. This meant that it was impossible to use phone stocks in China or Taiwan, and so the units on hand were paltry.
"It will become more severe, since India has dual-mode LTE, so our devices will have to do 2G, GPRS, 3G, FDD-LTE, and TDD-LTE, making India the only market for us today where a five-mode device is required," Barra told ET.
Post a Comment