Smartphone firm storm smart TV market

It was in 2016 Chinese consumer technology major Xiaomi entered Indian market with its smartphones at Bangalore. They where doing pretty well in the smartphone manufacturing but they where more ambitious in making a Television.

After One and half years of research they entered the local markets with 3 variety models of smart TVs in March 2018.They started shipping their product to India By November. It almost took 9 months for the company to hit first million mark. The company had crossed its 3 million mark this year October says Raghu Reddy the head of TV category.

According to Consumer Electronics and Appliances Manufacturers Association (CEAMA) Xiaomi held 13 percent share of overall TV market in 2018-19.They are now competing against the major players Samsung(27%),LG(25%),Sony(17%) and Panasonic (5%).

The main difference between these main players and Xiaomi are they offer only smart Televisions. The share of smart TVs in the local market was 18% of the total, It had grown to 33% in September 2019. Xiaomi had contributed nearly 80% to this surge says Raghu Reddy. The key advantage of Xiaomi was the over-the-top (OTT) content like Hotstar , Amazon Prime etc. and it was familiar to the public among smartphones. People are fond of OTT contents since they include it in their television to attract the customers. The price was also very low as compared to the major players about 25 to 40 percent.

In order to capture the market Xiaomi launched their first smart Tv model at a lower price than the LED TVs available in the market. 32 inch smart TV was just Rs.13,499 and 55 inch Ultra HD TV cost only 54,999, which was almost %)% lower than the closest competitor. They came up with more OTT apps with the Television, beside that they introduced universal search engine that locates the searched content if it is available anywhere.

OTT had grown fast in the market because of its content quality and variety and convenience of its “on demand” feature. This changed the buyers expectations for buying a TV. While there entry some of the other brands where having an eye to launch a similar product. Brands like Micromax ,Thomson ,Kodak , TCL had smart TVs with similar price tags. So to beat these competitors Xiaomi started selling there product through online only. They had a reach over 2,500 partner stores in terms of physical presence. Competitors like Samsung, VU, Kodak started catching up with pre installing OTT apps, Xiaomi started loading regular software updates and added more new OTT apps.

Similar to the case of smartphones bringing more video quality and the speed in broadband attracts the customers ,the customer preference was to shift to a wider screen. CEAMA estimates 55 inch TV will have 20 percent market share by the end of 2019 compared to what it was 2 years ago. Xiaomi also launched new models of 55 inch and a flagship model of 65 inches.