Google is looking to double down on its inventory for smartphones in India this year. Last year, Google brought the Pixel 4a to India and doubled its inventory. But this year, the global search engine giant is looking to double down further, a senior company executive confirmed. Adding to this, Google is also looking to move a portion of its manufacturing plants to India for both domestic and exports purposes. The Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme will further attract Google to open manufacturing facilities in India like Apple and Samsung. But the company didn’t introduce 5G variants of the Pixel devices in India citing ‘hardware cost’.
Google Looking at the Price Curve and Learning
According to an ET Telecom report, Google is on the lookout for smartphones priced in the range of Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000. The company executive said that introducing the Pixel 4a at an aggressive price helped the company a lot. But Google didn’t bring in 5G variants of Pixel devices (Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5 5G) to India because of ‘hardware cost’. The executive said that Qualcomm chipsets are expensive. Thus, bringing a smartphone with a 5G chipset would increase its overall cost. Since India doesn’t have commercial 5G networks live at the moment and things look to be slow on the roll-out end, it doesn’t make sense to launch high priced 5G smartphones. The Google executive confirmed that the company’s focus will be on the ‘price segments’ in the Indian market. Google is bound to face very stiff competition in the Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 segment for smartphones. Companies such as Apple, Samsung, and OnePlus hold 90% of the Indian market in the concerned segment according to Counterpoint Research. Other companies such as Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo are still very new in this segment. The number of players has increased which means that Google will have to carefully look at its strategy before approaching the market with smartphones in the concerned range.
