If you are looking to buy a smartwatch between the ₹1,000 and ₹10,000 price band, it will not be an easy decision to make. The complication in India’s smartwatch space, if too much choice can indeed be considered as such, is led by many an Indian tech company. Some have between 60 and 100 different budget smartwatches (with variants, of course) listed for sale. It is nigh impossible for a consumer to make the perfect pick.
In November, the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) India Monthly Wearable Device Tracker warned as much. They noted that India’s wearable device market had declined for the second consecutive quarter, by 20.7% year-over-year (YoY), to 38 million units. That’s what Sunil Raina, who is Executive Director of Lava International Ltd., believes is the foundation of a delivery gap that exists — what consumer expect when they splash the cash, is very different from how their smartwatch usage experience pans out in the subsequent months.
Lava’s making a bid to change that, with the ProWatch X. This isn’t the Indian tech company’s first smartwatch (the Prowatch ZN, Prowatch VN and Prowatch V1 have previously seen the light of day), but the pricing play with the ProWatch X would certainly make it their most expensive bet yet. When it launches, expect this to be priced around ₹5,000.
Easier said than done, but it is interesting to note that Lava is the only Indian phone maker to emerge on the other side almost unscathed after the Chinese phone makers completely took over the market around 2014. Some big name casualties from that time include Micromax; in stark contrast, Lava’s recent smartphones including Blaze Duo and Agni 3, are instead setting category benchmarks in terms of features (dual screens, for example). The learnings from that tumultuous time, and that persistence, should hold the smartwatch efforts in good stead. They aren’t just competing with the likes of Noise and Boat, but also brands with deeper global investments including Xiaomi.
Also Read: Tech Tonic | The interesting contours of India’s smartphone market
In an interaction with HT, Raina talks about the ProWatch X’s development story, the competition landscape, what consumers are looking for with smartwatches, a worrying trend of ‘return rates’ and manufacturing in India. Edited excerpts.
Q. Lava’s ProWatch X smartwatch is incoming, and is expected to be more premium than before. What’s the development story, and how do you see it amidst tough competition?
Sunil Raina: What has basically happened is very interesting, a sort of a deja vu moment similar to what happened with smartphones around the year 2009. Whoever was in this space was doing numbers and making money. But then it hit an inevitability because fundamentally all these brands were built on very weak foundations. I’m particularly talking about Indian companies, and that’s why a complete collapse within five to six years time when Chinese phone brands started coming in around 2014. Five years was too short a time for us to build anything that could compete with brands that had an almost ten years advantage. They were far better prepared than all of us.
We did pick a lot of learning but didn’t get enough time to build to the level where we could compete from day one. In the resulting chaos, many Indian companies had to shut down. We had already started this journey of making sure of product, technology and manufacturing foundations, by starting work in China because India had no ecosystem at the time. Later on when we got the opportunity when the Make in India initiative took off, we shifted everything. We are the only ones doing that. We were called stupid at that time for doing all this because everybody felt we were wasting money.
Yet, we had this clear idea how it needs to be built though it was a very rough patch of four to five years. If you see in the last two and a half years time in the smartphone space, we have started competing. This is our complete learning cycle which helped us when we looked at smartwatches and audio categories. We realised there are a lot of similarities in product and manufacturing processes, as well as the same front end including retailers as well as service. In the smartwatch space, a lot of poor quality work being done and customers are being inundated with options which are just cheap. Not just in price, but also in quality.
There’s a very clear opportunity to build a strong brand. In the past couple of years, numbers have dropped significantly in the smartwatch space and that’s because of complete disillusionment buyers have with this category now. Think about it, if there was no need, consumers wouldn’t be buying affordable smartwatches in the first place?
Q. What are buyers looking for in wearables now, and do affordable smartwatches in particular have a quality as well as distinctiveness problem?
SR: Every category goes through its own cycle, and smartwatches too are in a nascent stage where most people are still trying to figure out what it can do for them. Take for example when Android phones first came into the market. You’d be surprised how many retailers told us that people are preferring Android because they can play Angry Birds and Talking Tom games on these phones. At that point, buyers really didn’t know what all it can do – now they realise they can do a lot more with smartphones.
Initially everybody positioned smartwatches as a lifestyle product. Once people started purchasing these smart watches, they discovered that there are other things that can it can do for them, such as health tracking or replicate some phone functions. But when they actually started using them extensively, these watches returned a very poor experience. Some brands even have a 25% customer returned rate, which means one out of four people is having trouble and has to get it repaired or replaced.
This category will evolve. The problem is that there’s a gap between what consumers expect and what is being delivered, and that gap is something that we want to come and fill.
Q. Is the Prowatch X being manufactured in India, and is the software being developed in-house?
SR: The components will be sourced from outside India wherever they are available, because that’s just how this ecosystem. We will use our manufacturing facilities and we have designed the ProWatch X ourselves. The software and applications have been developed by our teams here. We are not using Google’s smartwatch operating system. There is a continued process to fine tune everything because we have a certain thought processes around which we have actually built everything.
Compared with smartphones which have attained a much higher localisation component, the smartwatch category will take some time to get there. Since we are not component makers ourselves. From that perspective, the ProWatch X is a completely indigenous product.
