Month: February 2014

HTC Desire 816 + ZTE Grand Memo II SmartPhones at #MWC 2014

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Live Picture of HTC Desire 816 Launch at MWC 2014At the MWC, HTC launched its new mid-end device, Desire 816, which features 5.5″ Super LCD screen, 720p video recording, QCOM MSM8228 1.6GHz quad-core AP, dual front-facing speakers, Boom Sound, 2600 mAh battery life, and 5 MP/13 MP camera (both front/rear camera being upgraded). We view these hardware spec attractive, but pricing could be the key swing factor.

HTC M8 High End SmartPhone Features & Review
On 25 March 2014, HTC plans to announce its new flagship model, M8. We expect M8 to be slightly bigger than M7 (4.7″), and to upgrade its camera to something similar with Google’s Project Tango (two camera modules to capture the depth information). If M8 is going to support 4K video recording

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Samsung Galaxy S5 + Sony Xperia Z2 + LG G Pro 2 – Flagship SmartPhones MWC 2014

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Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014, the mobile industry’s largest annual event took place in Barcelona. Several flagship models were launched, including Samsung’s Galaxy S5, Sony Xperia Z2, and LG’s G2 Pro, with this year’s releases focusing on incremental improvements in user experience and hardware specifications, but fewer gimmicks or breakthroughs to accelerate high-end replacements. Samsung’s innovations improved on design (dust/waterproof/colours/icons, camera upgrades, processing and connectivity and better fitness / health tools while Sony made a more modest upgrade from its

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BigCommerce Next – Powering Offline Retailers to Go Online / Mobile

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Big Commerce The homegrown engineering team from Aussie tech startup Bigcommerce has revealed new tools to help anyone become an online / mobile retail entrepreneur.

Called Bigcommerce Next, it’s a whole host of new tools and systems (20 new features). It rolls out today to the 50,000 stores that use this Aussie startup’s software. We’d be happy to put you in touch with one or two of them so you can see how

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How Reliance Jio intends to Deploy & Use 1800Mhz Spectrum ? Voice or 4G LTE ?

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Reliance Jio Home LTEReliance Jio Infocomm won 5-7MHz spectrum in 1800 band in 14 circles. These 14 circles account for 71%+ of industry revenues, and include all the metros and Category A circles.

Reliance Jio Infocomm in a press release said,
There are several mobile phones and devices available today which have the capability to operate both TD-LTE and FD-LTE technologies in 1800MHz and 2300MHz bands as well as conventional 2G / 3G networks. Rapid strides in global LTE rollouts and introduction of several new chipsets is making LTE enabled smart mobile phones and devices affordable. In any case, Wi-Fi enabled 2G/3G device can access RJIL’s services through an

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Google’s India Vernacular for Android Very Soon; To get 1 Billion Indians Online

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Google India Target 1 Billion IndiansSpeaking at the IIFL Investors Conference, Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India said that Google’s basic objective in India is to get a billion people on the Internet. With smartphone base in India increasing rapidly, this is achievable quickly, as India is a unique country. Within two years, a majority of Internet users would be accessing the net only through their mobile. The biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity are in creating a vernacular user interface.

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Telenor / Uninor India Positions as Low Cost Operator, Circlewise Operations

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Telenor - Uninor India Operations After the Supreme Court’s Feb 2012 decision to quash all of company’s licenses, Telenor bought back spectrum in six circles (AP, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, UP (E), and UP (W)), shutting down its commercial operations in seven others. Telenor’s Indian Operations Uninor has taken a different strategy for 2G Voice operations in India positioning itself as a Low Cost Operator.

Instead of going for pan-circle network coverage to begin with, Telenor focuses on bringing its network quality at par with the leaders in the market in select clusters in a

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Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Consolidate at Top Position at the cost of CDMA Operators in 2013

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GSM incumbents led by Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular have regained the market share after seasonal weakness – in line with historical trends. On a structural basis CDMA / PSU operators have found it difficult to defend their market share despite 10-11% industry growth. Healthy execution and strong brand positioning, we believe, would drive market share gains for top 3 operators (Airtel, Vodafone and Idea). We believe Idea Cellular – as a pure-play wireless operator – will be the biggest

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JustDial Spending Heavily on Sales & Marketing to Expand Reach

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JustDial Spending to Expand ReachJustDial, the Local Yellow / White Pages Search Engine which diversified into e-commerce is spending heavily in expanding its reach by adding more sales force augmented with online Ad campaigns.

Currently it has a good presence in about 25 cities, although is touching 100 cities through either its own sales team or freelancers. Further, it intends to spend Rs600-1000mn to increase awareness and promote JD Search+ in FY15. Management believes that despite these additional costs / expenditures, benefits of operating leverage should lead to ~100 bps margin expansion.

Justdial does depend on Google for traffic

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200 Mn Internet Users with 55 Mn Subscribers – End of 2013

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India InternetIndia currently has 200 mn+ Internet users growing at 4 mn per month. This compares to 106 mn at end-June 2011. Active users would be around 170 mn. At the end of 2013, India has 55 Mn Broadband subscribers [Speed > 512 Kbps]. However, the real opportunity lies in the mobile area where the number of people who access the Internet through mobile handsets is 130 mn (December 2013). This would rise to 185 mn by June 2014. The number of rural subscribers has gone up to 27 mn as of December 2013 from 4 mn as of June 2012. The increasing affordability of smartphones is driving mobile Internet penetration. Also, given broadband plans are more affordable now, 3G users will rise to 175 mn by 2015 versus 50 mn currently.

Online e-Commerce and Productivity in India
28% of all travel is booked online. 7% of bank users in India access their accounts online. 25% of IT returns are filed online. 47% of classifieds business

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SnapDeal e-nabling Small Retailers to Sell Online & Expand Verticals

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92% of the US$600 bn market is unorganized. India is a hub of almost 50 mn small and medium businesses. The problem for the offline markets are high real estate costs, low product discoverability, limited assortment merchandising and low reach. Online markets account for only US$2 bn currently.

How online market places are helping? It is easier to figure out trends on online markets and prepare the products accordingly. Also, working capital position of the retailer can be a lot better given low product batches. Mr Bahl gave a specific example of the benefits accruing to one of his customers from low working capital and greater planning and production flexibility. The same company has now been able to successfully branch out into another product category.

SnapDeal lists the following

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