Indian Industry Landscape: A Government Perspective

In every nook and corner of the globe, you will find citizens who curse there government for the local issues and come to the premise that government is no good. Developing countries that have opened up their markets partially and house more than 25% of the total world population, the government is criticized more than required. I also at times found that the government is not good enough in India to address the generic issue of poverty, education and health for the poor.

In this section, I would like to discuss the issue of the Indian Government interaction with the development of Indian industry with respect to the partial open markets. Let’s take it case by case.

Mobile Industry: The telecommunication industry has taken India by a storm in less than a decade and a half; the penetration of the mobile telephony has surpassed the landline connection. The features provided by the mobile operators accelerated the pace of the development of new mobile handsets in the country. With mass manufacturing facility in China, Nokia was poised to become the leader of the India market with almost 40% of the market share. The dominance of Nokia reduced with the arrival of the competitors like LG, Samsung etc. But still from the launch of mobile services in early 1996 Nokia has dominated the handset markets with the unique competency of easy operatability of the product. This feature catched up with the Indian psyche of easy usage of calling and messaging.

 

Since other features of most of the mobile users are redundant for the user itself. A survey will reveal that more than 80% of people use calling and messaging only.

As the government realized that the technological depth of the service providers is going to increase to new levels with introductions of 3G and also of new OS for the phones by MS, Google etc. The handset industry is poised to grow. While the majority of the sales were from the low cost segment in the market. Government started initiating the local manufacturers to start the mobile manufacturing with the tax exemptions like no excise and sales tax on the mobiles and hence with the aid of government the handset companies have got a competitive edge in pricing. Though the companies never had a strong technological backing from the in house R & D, the Chinese model of copying and launching the mobile phones with a slight modification worked in the market. The penetration strategy worked to the best of the ability in the semi urban and rural market. Slowly the ultra low cost handsets with their slightly above average quality has