Shashin Devsare, executive director, Karbonn Mobiles, said the year 2016 has been a significant year for the telecom industry with the introduction of 4G technology.

There is a paradigm shift in the consumption pattern of customers with data increasingly dominating their daily usage. Ironically, despite the spurt in data usage with economical 4G data services, the feature phone market continued to grow in 2016. This paradox can be viewed in the light of reluctance of Indian consumer to transition to smartphones due to adoption issues.

While the smartphone market continued to grow, albeit not at the expected pace, targeting the replacement market, there is still  a significant chunk of the consumer who hasn’t upgraded to Smartphones as they see little relevance of Smartphones in their lives. While hardware specifications are getting commoditized it is critical for Smartphone players to deliver a simplified experience to the consumers which are relevant and easy to adopt.  This is where the USP of the indigenous players lie.

We at Karbonn with insights into the Indian consumers’ needs have been striving towards bridging the digital barrier to bring the next billion users under the smart telephony fold. Introducing devices with full language support including most used apps, device menu and search in the customers’ native tongue has been a step towards this goal.

The success of our local language supported device K9 Smart is a testimony to the growing demand for Indian language supported devices amongst the non-English speaking Indian population. We have also been bolstering our VAS partnership networks to bring innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence, IoT and Virtual reality for delivering simplified and enriching smartphone experience to the consumer.

Our collaborations with utility and entertainment- based service providers are also targeted at easy discoverability of relevant services.

Shashin Devsare, executive director, Karbonn Mobiles