Companies that are aggressively bringing out high–end smartphones, will have to rethink their strategies as well as hardware incorporation strategies. According to a recent study conducted by global research firm Gartner, the market for premium or high–end smartphones is not just shrinking, but could very well be nearing its end. While giving its global outlook for the PC, tablet and mobile phone shipments, the firm said,

"The mobile phone market will continue to experience steady growth, but the opportunity for high average selling price (ASP) smartphones is now ending"

According to the research firm, the reason for the diminishing demand is not due to the impact of Falling Rupee; that forced companies to raise prices of handsets by as much as 12–20%. However, the market of these high-priced devices is being eaten into by mid–tier manufacturers as well as low-end or entry level Android Devices, clarified Gartner,

"The market is being driven by a shift to lower-priced devices in nearly all device categories."

Is the market falling?
The answer is a reassuring NO. The market for smartphones appears headed nowhere but up. Worldwide smartphone shipments are expected to grow by as much as 40% on year-over-year basis. By the end of this year, companies expect to ship more than 1 Billion units. But, unlike in countries like India, where people prefer to buy smartphones without contract, the global demand for these smart devices is due to the heavy subsidies, the Networks (Telecom companies offering phones On Contract) offer, revealed Gartner,

"High smartphone growth is the result of a variety of factors, including steep device subsidies from carriers, especially in mature economic markets, as well as a growing array of sub-$200 smartphones"

Smartphones have altered the market dynamics. Owing to their powerful internals and portability, they have cannibalized the Desktop and PC market. Now it appears, the sub–segments are fighting among themselves. With the economy being tough and people feeling the pinch of rising expenses, could the companies making high–priced devices, be forced to alter the very essence of their elite standards?

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Micromax recently appointed popular Hollywood Actor Hugh Jackam as its brand ambassador for Canvas series of smartphones. The comapny also took wraps off its latest flagship smartphone Canvas Turbo (A250). The device sports a 5 inch  full-HD CGS (Continuous Grain Silicon) IPS display with 1080×1920 pixels resolution. Powered by a 1.5 GHz MT6589T quad-core processor from MediaTek, the Canvas Turbo comes with 2GB RAM and 16 GB storage space. However, unfortunately there is no slot for microSD card and thus the phone does not allow memory expansion.

The device which runs on latest Android 4.3 features a 13MP rear camera and a 5MP front camera. It also includes a number of features like Panorama, Cinemagraph and Object Eraser. Similar to the Canvas 4, this phone will offer the “unique” Blow-to-Unlock functionality. In terms of connectivity the device available in blue and white supports Bluetooth v4.0 and Wi-Fi. The phone packs in a slew of preloaded apps and features including BBM & Hike for Instant Messaging, Spuul to watch free movies, Kingsoft Office, M!Security, M!Unlock, M!Live and Game-hub.

Priced at Rs 19,990, the Canvas Turbo is available for sale all over India. The phone is pretty decent and competes with the likes of mid range devices from Samsung, Nokia, HTC and Sony. The company contributes to 22% of the Indian smartphone market share as per IDC’s report. Last week, Micromax announced its plans to expand in Europe starting with Russia. Last month the company which has 12.3% share in tablet market unveiled Canvas Tab p650.

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Online Ad and Crowd–sourced Classifieds Listing portal Quikr.com, operated by Mumbai-based Quikr India Pvt. Ltd., has now started to make serious inroads in the proactive business generation techniques.

As per latest update from the company, Quikr.com is now making more than 50% of its revenue from Paid Services like Premium Listings for users as well as Lead Generation Services for businesses. This is for the first time that the scales have tipped from the earlier scenario wherein the portal made most of its revenue from advertisements, exclaimed Pranay Chulet, Co-founder and CEO, Quikr,

"Our non-ad revenue is well over 50 per cent now and continues to grow fast. It means that our paid listings and lead generation services are working well. We have a large number of small businesses as well as consumers who are subscribing to these premium services"

The change in the dynamics of revenue generation, is certainly a very crucial phase for the company, as it can now focus more of its attention and resources to scale up the in–house services rather than relying on promotional activities to draw in advertisers.

The company appears to be on the right track and has even managed to achieve the desired pace of growth, as approximately the same time last year, when Advertising was Quikr's biggest revenue generation stream, Chulet had shared his vision, wherein he expected Quikr's revenues stream to be spread–out in similar manner as it is happening now.

Quikr has some interesting growth metrics. More than 60% of searches on the site, seem to be originating from its mobile based sites and application, thereby proving the efficiency and applicability of an advertising engine from the mobile perspective. The site claims about 30 Million Unique Page Views and expects to cross 100 Million in the next 2–3 Years.

Surprisingly, Quikr seems to be making more money from areas where its rival Olx.in backed off citing low levels of market maturity as the primary reason. Perhaps the withdrawal of Olx offered big enough void and opportunity for Quikr to expand. What do you think?

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Online bus ticketing portal TravelGoose has raised a funding worth Rs 18 crore from US based Indventure. The raised funds will be used by the company to expand operations, increasing the workforce and enhancing customer experience. This is company’s second round of funding after it bagged Rs 3 Cr from US-based angel investors last year in July.

Founded by Karthi Easwaramoorthy, Arun Athiappan and Vasu Ramasamy in 2007, the portal provides information like price, availability and booking facility for buses to more than 4500 destinations in South India and currently has more than 700 bus operators. The Chennai based company claims to have aggregated information on over 10,000 routes with 20,000 buses and works with over 6,000 agents. TicketGoose has also launched a travel insurance policy for accident, baggage damage and medical expense.

The company is expecting a turnover (gross) of Rs 100 crore this fiscal, as per a report from the Economic Times. Easwarmoorthy also touted in the report that 95% of the Rs 30,000 crore bus ticketing  market is still untapped.

A recent report by IAMAI & IMRB revealed that bus bookings has registered a whopping 185% growth. Also a Google and IPSOS study stated that 76% Indian travelers use smartphone and tablets for travel search. The online bus ticketing sector has become competitive with players like redBus and MakeMyTrip. Earlier in June this year iBibo group acquired redBus for $120 million.

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Android is all set to get a performance boost soon! Google has reportedly acquired FlexyCore, a startup which specializes in maximizing performance in Android devices, for $23 million. Their product DroidBooster was the reason behind the acquisition. The app, according to some reviews, could reportedly boost  performance of ARM devices up to ten times the normal output. They say it does this by generating optimized binary for ARM devices using Dalvik code. Dalvik is a virtual process machine for Android which enables apps to run.

Overall, it seems Droidbooster speeds Android performance on the whole for all kinds of  smartphones and ARM devices. This means gains in terms of speed and battery life, crucial bits for modern smartphones. Google has been in the process of acquiring the startup since a year and it seems like a acqui-hire. The Droidbooster app is nowhere to be seen on the Google Play store and Flexycore's website is redirecting to a webmail site.

Flexycore is a french startup that has been operational since the last 5 years and has already raised funding to the tune of 1.5 million Euros from VC Sochrastem, a Paris based venture capital firm. Google has confirmed the acquisition and has also said that the team has been directly integrated with the Android team.

Implications:

This is exciting because the implications for Android are immense. Android has already been criticized early in its lifecycle because of its lagginess as compared to iOS. When Jellybean was released, it benefited from something called Project Butter, which aimed at making OS smooth in terms of rendering and usage. However, Android still needs somewhat high-end hardware to run optimally. It lags on lower and mid-end phones even though it can run tasks on them. This is because of the crunch that the hardware resources face on low-spec phones. If functionality of Droidbooster can be integrated into the core Android system, it can solve the problem of performance for low and mid-end phones and thus make the user experience on par. This would result in higher adoption in developing countries and other markets which are still to experience smartphones and their ability for work, communication and entertainment. Google would definitely like to let its services spread in these markets. For those of us that have smartphones already, the next version of Android could be much more powerful and the phones would get even more affordable.

Source | Techcrunch

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