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Android Businesses Cellphones Handhelds The Almighty Buck The Internet

Indian Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Snub Android One Phones 53

Posted by timothy from the but-fellas-our-plans-changed dept.
oyenamit writes Online shopping in India is still in its infancy but is growing tremendously to reach the mostly untapped market of 1.2 billion people. Invariably, the conflict between pure online retailers like Amazon and Flipkart and brick and mortar stores was bound to emerge. Unfortunately for Google's Android One, it has been on the receiving end of this friction. Leading brick and mortar retailers in India have refused to sell Android One handsets ever since the US company chose to launch its products exclusively online. The three Android One makers in India — Micromax, Karbonn and Spice — launched their handsets exclusively online in mid-September. When sales did not meet their expectations, they decided to release their products via the brick and mortar store channel. However, smaller retailer and mom-n-pop shops have decided to show their displeasure at having being left out of the launch by deciding not to stock Android One. The Android One phones, announced at the most recent Google I/O, are Google's attempt to bring stock Android (as on Google's Nexus devices) to emerging markets, with competent but not high-end phones.
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Indian Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Snub Android One Phones More

Indian Brick-and-Mortar Retailers Snub Android One Phones

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  • ...or maybe (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    they refuse to stock it because it didn't sell well online. Who wants to have unattractive inventory?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      exactly. how cheap is it anyways? it needs to be under 80 bucks to be cheap enough to be a cheap android handset. nokia x is 80 bucks. 20 bucks more is not cheap(nokia x xl was 100 bucks on launch, like 8 months ago). from what I could find android one launch price was 100 bucks, though it has quad core. but the fuck the target audience cares about that? nothing. two things matter: how nice it feels in the hand and how good the screen looks - ram and other numbers not so much. the third thing that matters i

  • Very very good price. But cheaper online. Very cheap.

  • However, smaller retailer and mom-n-pop shops have decided to show their displeasure at having being left out of the launch by deciding not to stock Android One.

    Cutting the jolly nose off to be spiting one's face, old boy, what?

    • Do the needful and revert the same (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Cutting the jolly nose off to be spiting one's face, old boy, what?

      Not really. They stock other phones which sells fine. Google messed up - these people got insulted and consequently won't sell the google phone. Doesn't stop them from selling phones and smartphones in general. It is not a problem for them.

    • You might have a point had the phones broken sales records online. But since the phones sold poorly online they are probably losing very little by not buying up what will be mostly unsold inventory.

  • Understanding the Indian retailers. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Saturday November 22, 2014 @08:34AM (#48439807) Journal
    The retail sector in India evolved under very severe capital crunch. The retailer was the king in that environment. It was the retailer who takes the risk and orders goods to be sold, put up the money whether it gets sold or not. Unsold retail merchandise is never taken by the manufacturer usually in India. They borrow using a traditional chit fund system. [wikipedia.org] They borrow at 24% to 36% rate of interest. Sometimes even higher than that. They usually operate at 40% margin, not counting the cost of capital. They cooperate (or collude, depending on your POV) and treat both customers and their suppliers with little mercy.

    Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them. They are used to hardball by retailer and any naive implementation of US level customer service will be gamed to death within two quarters.

    Google will do well to

    1 open its own stores,

    2 use its strength in access to capital,

    3 introduce products with differentiation so that you would not be using the same phone your driver is using,

    4 deliver superior customer service to those who play fair

    5 undertake price war for the in market above "servant maids and drivers and cooks" sector and below the "MNC executive, people rolling in black money" sector

    • Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them.

      Is "class-conscious" some new euphemism for "assholes" that I haven't previously been aware of?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Eevee ( 535658 )

        Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them.

        Is "class-conscious" some new euphemism for "assholes" that I haven't previously been aware of?

        It depends. Is "I haven't previously been aware of" a new euphemism for "I have my head shoved so far up my ass that I've never noticed how societies work"? Because there is nothing new about this behavior anyplace. People were assholes about class indicators long ago, they are ass

        • Thank you for enlightening the situation. I'm a mostly rational schizoid who simply gets puzzled about such unfamiliar behavior. There's a possibility, indeed a certainty that such events actually happen around where I live, but I'm virtually certain they're a low-key event compared to this level of insanity.

    • Leading brick and mortar retailers in India have refused to sell Android One handsets ever since the US company chose to launch its products exclusively online.

      If they are only available on-line, how would mortar retailers be selling them anyway, unless they were buying them on-line and marking the price up? What consumer would go for that?

      • Those who can't buy them online, because they're not online yet? Just a thought...

      • Read the rest of the summary:

        When sales did not meet their expectations, they decided to release their products via the brick and mortar store channel. However, smaller retailer and mom-n-pop shops have decided to show their displeasure at having being left out of the launch by deciding not to stock Android One.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Google will do well to 1 open its own stores,

      Good luck with that. The small mom and pop retailers may not represent a large part of the market or retail capital. But they have lots of votes. And they will keep big players out of their market at the ballot box.

      • They haven't kept Samsung, LG, Sony or others from having their own stores. Not just small shops in malls, but full blown bricks & mortars stores. In case of Samsung, LG & Sony, they sell all their products there - TVs, fridges, phones, you name it. No reason to think that Google would be stopped.

        Like the GP said, Google would do well to introduce differentiated products, so that you have low ends for servants & maids, & high ends for MNC executives and tax dodgers.

    • Are you from the 90s. We have retail stores run by reliance, tata and huge chains. They have their own sister banks and investment firms. I doubt they have to borrow money at all, surely not at 25%, unless it is an accounting trick. Your whole post screams 90s mom and pop store. They have been replaced by chains even in larger towns

  • A few caveats (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 8086 ( 705094 ) on Saturday November 22, 2014 @02:26PM (#48440773) Homepage
    Some factors to consider:

    1. The Android Ones are a hard sell in India and nobody cares about Stock vs Proprietary Android. The Xiaomi Redmi 1S which sells for less than these phones and has much better specs is a huge hit in India. I bought one about a week ago for ~Rs. 6000 ($100) in a flash sale, and its already out of stock at all major online retailers. To top that, there's news of an even cheaper (~Rs. 4000) Xiaomi phone with a 4G modem coming soon. I did look at the Android One phones when I was shopping, but ended up getting the Xiaomi because of the better build quality and necessary luxuries like a scratchproof screen and non-shitty camera which the Android Ones lack. Also, there are better featured phones (with older Android in some cases) available in the same price bracket as the Android Ones from these same manufacturers. My servant bought a 6 inch Micromax phablet a month ago for ~Rs. 7000. (Yes, I'm not one of the aforementioned 'class-conscious' assholes, although they do exist). Btw, CyanogenMod works well on the Xiaomi and I now have a fully functional portable ScummVM gaming console - something that my iDevices and Samsung Androids from the past 4 years haven't been able to do without bricking/breaking warranty.

    2. Brick-and-mortar mobile stores are a lot less regulated and organized, and come in way more shapes and sizes than the article makes them out to be. For instance, a lot of "mom-and-pop" phone shops in India will gladly sell you pirated software and content, non-licensed Chinese parts, and no-name Chinese phones. If you're unlucky, they'll even sell you refurbished items as new. These are highly independent wheeler dealers who do what it takes to make a profit. The real effect of this stocking ban will be that only big-name mobile shops such as those run by the major cellular carriers or the equivalents of Best Buy here in India will not stock the Android Ones, but the countless little shops will still do it.

    3. Online shopping has reached critical mass only just now, i.e. the Diwali 2014 season. The technology and players have been around for a long time - I made my first online purchase here in 2000, but India-friendly options such as cash-on-delivery and zero-fee cash transfers have only recently come up. Trust is a huge issue here when not buying face-to-face from a person, because we don't have faith in the due process getting our money back if something goes wrong. If you buy face-to-face, you can at least go and rough up the guy who sold you the defective item, or so the argument went. But, times are changing, and people don't want to pay the "brick-and-mortar tax" anymore. Big retail in India is shit-scared, and there's possibly even corporate psychological warfare going on against e-commerce:
    Story 1 [firstpost.com] Story 2 [indiatimes.com].

  • Android One is "stock with bloatware". Nexus is "stock with Verizon bloatware only." Manufacturers can add bloatware to Android One, because they want to, or because they sell bloatware space to 3rd parties like ad inventory. On Nexus you have to negotiate your bloatware onto the phone by threatening to delay approval of its radio and waiting for Android to surrender like they always do, but on Android One you can just add it. Google even provides a convenient mechanism to load bloatware so it doesn't d

  • The CEO of another top consumer electronics retail chain said the margin offered for Android One was around 3-4% which is much less than the industry average of 9-10%. "No point wasting energy," he said. http://timesofindia.indiatimes... [indiatimes.com]

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