In the last one year, Micromax’s CEO Vineet Taneja feels, ecommerce was the biggest disruption that happened to the mobile industry. From about a year back when only 5% of Micromax mobiles were sold online, the number has gone up to 20-25% — with about 30% for smartphones.
“It is a new way of doing business, with a completely different supply chain and different marketing,” said Taneja.
Micromax directly sells only 5% phones online, but if retailers who have started selling on ecommerce sites are taken, the number is higher.
Overall, Karan Thakkar, IDC’s analyst, says online contributes about 15-20% of overall smartphone sales. For online players, anything between 50-60% of overall sales are mobile phones. India’s largest homegrown mobile handset company, which expects to close this financial year at revenue of more than Rs 12,000 crore, expects the online contribution to go up, as more people have started using the internet from their mobiles. India has about 250 million internet users, and about 200 million access the internet from mobiles.
Growth in mobile commerce has increased growth in online buying. Ecommerce companies have already started seeing the change. For companies like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal, mobile commerce is more than 50% of their business. Every ecommerce company wants to do an exclusive deal with mobile makers.
By Sunny Sen