One piece of tech news that came in last week was that Samsung overtook Apple in smartphone shipments for Q3.
To get another perspective on the above data, below is some more context:
(*I count here the number of products available in India only. Numbers, of course, in millions).
Take a moment to see those numbers. The company with just two products led the market in Q2, and is #2 in Q3(one reason for which is that many customers held off purchases since they were waiting for a iPhone 4S).
What’s more, this two-product company also has 66% of the entire industry’s profits in Q2. The hypercompetitive, super-fragmented mobile handset market – yeah.
One moral of the story? What they taught you in those strategy courses – focus is good. What all entrepreneurs are asked to religiously adhere to – do a few things well instead of trying many things.
Focus on a few pwns differentiation among many, if this data is anything to judge by.
What do you think?
[Shamanth Rao is the head of campaign management for APAC at InMobi (http://InMobi.com ). You can follow him on Twitter here. His writings are at http://BywayStar.com .]
