Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Samsung whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.
Cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).
Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth. Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's I-Phone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you?
These examples illustrate that competition can come from anywhere. This raises the question – "who is my competitor?"
Let's look at a few other examples. What did Apple do to Sony, and Sony did to Kodak? Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Hardly surprising, Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities.
So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital." In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?"
The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "Internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.
Tough compteition to Airlines operating in India are increasingly coming not from other airlines but from videoconferencing and telepresence services provided by the likes of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India had a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). Optimists in the airline business are counting on a rebound post recession. They are right for the short term but will continue to lose business in the longer term. Cost of computers and communication equipment continue to drop whereas cost of air travel will continue to rise.
India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. Earlier cricket was fundamentally "test cricket" or at best "50 over one day cricket". Then came IPL ( Indian Premier League) and the two markets converge into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate cinema hall and multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season is already giving films a hard time.
This post is a modified and reproduced from an article originally written by Dr. YLR. Moorthi who is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
To sum it up, people and organisations need to ask themselves the questions
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Samsung whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.
Cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras.
Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).
Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth. Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's I-Phone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you?
These examples illustrate that competition can come from anywhere. This raises the question – "who is my competitor?"
Let's look at a few other examples. What did Apple do to Sony, and Sony did to Kodak? Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Hardly surprising, Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities.
So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital." In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?"
The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "Internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.
Tough compteition to Airlines operating in India are increasingly coming not from other airlines but from videoconferencing and telepresence services provided by the likes of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India had a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). Optimists in the airline business are counting on a rebound post recession. They are right for the short term but will continue to lose business in the longer term. Cost of computers and communication equipment continue to drop whereas cost of air travel will continue to rise.
India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. Earlier cricket was fundamentally "test cricket" or at best "50 over one day cricket". Then came IPL ( Indian Premier League) and the two markets converge into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate cinema hall and multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season is already giving films a hard time.
This post is a modified and reproduced from an article originally written by Dr. YLR. Moorthi who is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.
To sum it up, people and organisations need to ask themselves the questions
- How do I define my business?
- Who is my competitor?
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