It’s time Indian players step up the tempo on the Smart home, the time is ripe – the scene is about to explode and all the critical success factors point to just 1 direction – an exponential growth.
The global biggies like Amazon and Google have delayed their entry first because they thought India wasn’t ready and second they had huge captive audience to cater to. But things look different now. Google and Amazon will look to enter India shortly, Xiaomi just had a low key launch a week back. Pretty soon, it will become extremely difficult for 3rd, 4th and even later entrants to create any serious dent in the market.
What would ideally make Smart home work in a particular Geography, Well I have here an extensive but definitely not comprehensive list of factors that would come together to create a perfect recipe for it to work.
Large Captive Audience:
That makes it so easy really to have a foot in the door. You have a customer who trusts you all you are looking to do is expand your offering.
Amazon has been in devices domain for some time in India. Kindle has a solid subscription base and is present in multiple channels – Ecom, Modern Retail. Well Kindle is not exactly a smart home device but then people know Amazon to be devices player. Recently Amazon has been pushing really hard on Amazon Fire TV, and that has got fabulous response from customers. Fire TV de-facto smart home offering. Well Echo introduction is just going to be another affirmation. It becomes easy for existing customers to give it a try and the word gets spread like fire.
I see snippets here and there of India organizations working on smart home systems – Airtel, Jio, Godrej. And they all have a great captive audience to start with. Between Airtel and Reliance Jio will very soon account for 50% subscriber base.
https://jiohow.com/reliance-jio-smart-home-devices/
Penetration of Internet:
Internet is still underrepresented in India. With aggressive pricing, Jio has truly made a move on and it will only increase over time. Against a total mobile user base of 1.2 billion, the internet user base only stands at 400 million.
But Smart home will only be a metro and Tier 1 phenomena to start with where the situation is much more favorable.
In top 8 cities, against a population base of 80 Million, there are 60 Million internet users. If Reliance and Jio have 50% subscriber base, then they have 30 Million users to talk to. If the initial conversion is 20%, we have 6 Million users to start with – not a bad number by any standard.
Integration of products & services:
A smart home service in order to have wide scale acceptance must have integration with essentials products and services. The integrations have to be relevant to the Indian context.
Echo has amazing range of integrations ranging from products to services. Same will have to be reciprocated for India. A case in point being China – they are running parallel smart home eco system, a complete set of use cases relevant to the inhabitants.
Indian integration could similarly have Voltas (for AC), Usha (for fans, geysers, and other appliances), flipkart (for fulfillment partner), Ola, Café Coffee Day, TOI (news service), Gaana/Wynk (for music) and so on. India is not short on local heroes, but they definitely will need to come together.
Data Security & Privacy:
The Achilles Heel especially when it comes to something as sensitive as ‘personal smart home’. Smart homes are based on cloud integrations and AI, security is very well taken care of but no amount is too much when it comes to data privacy. Even best held systems have given up. Earlier one could just get hang of one category of data – bank breach would mean financial, mail breach would mean some private communication and probably a few passwords, but smart home is a different ball game altogether. All your habits, preferences, activities, most intimate chats would get into wrong hands and implications are only to be imagines, must worse than anything else.
What’s next?
Working in isolation is not going to cut the cake. It has to be integration – a telecom provider looking to integrate content is not going to cut the ice. What’s required is an all pervasive integration.
I do feel that some local integrator like flipkart/paytm can do an amazing job, if they can set sight of it. They have solid cloud skills, they know customer preferences well, and they will be selfless while integration as against pushing their own.
The revolution has yet not begun, but when it begins – I hope we are ready, because it’s gonna last long, it’s gonna be one shot, and only the brave will come through!
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