Jolla & Intex – The Bollysystem pt II.

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Jolla is to Intex what Cyanogen is to Micromax.

• Jolla has received another shot in the arm from a deal that it has struck with Intex for Sailfish to be the heart of Intex’s strategy to create an ecosystem upon its devices for the Indian market.
• This is very similar to what Micromax announced in October last year using Cyanogen (see here).
• However this has really yet to see the light of day as the Micromax Yureka and Yuphoria are predominantly Google ecosystem devices consigning any Indian specific services into the background.
• In essence the Micromax “Bollysystem” does not seem to have an Indian specific experience to it making this all about Google, consigning Micromax to a commodity.
• Whatever the outcome, Sailfish has one huge advantage over Cyanogen as Google has no presence on Sailfish meaning that the experience can be all about India rather than Google.
• This is exactly what Jolla and Intex are aiming for as the announcement goes hand in hand with announcements with Times Internet and Snapdeal.
• Times Internet is a leading provider of digital media for the Indian market while Snapdeal is an ecommerce provider.
• While this will help Sailfish offer greater coverage of the Digital Life pie for Indian users, there remains an awful long way to go and here Jolla is very weak.
• It now has a store with native Sailfish apps and it can run 100,000 Android apps on its platform but the situation is far from ideal.
• Android and iOS now have over 1.3m apps available and Android apps that run on Sailfish do so through and emulator rather than native which will create issues around performance compared to Android.
• Jolla will make its money by taking a share of any revenues generated from Digital Life services within the ecosystem which is exactly the model that Cyanogen has adopted.
• Jolla and Intex are the underdogs here as Intex is No. 2 in the Indian market and Cyanogen has $80m in the bank which I suspect is something like 20x what Jolla has.
• However, when it comes to the creation of the “Bollysystem”, Jolla and Intex are going in the right direction in ensuring that Google is completely excluded.
• India is virgin territory where most people have never used Google services and therefore do not demand them in a mobile device.
• In fact I think that in India the Android brand is far stronger than Google’s.
• Consequently, selling devices with Google services is in fact seeding the market on Google’s behalf and will make it much harder to establish a successful ecosystem focused on the local market (see here).
• While Jolla and Intex have got the strategy right, it remains to be seen whether they are able to execute on this strategy as neither are currently market leaders.
• Furthermore, the lack of a thriving third party ecosystem on Sailfish is going to be a problem when selling this proposition to users who often enter a mobile phone shop with Android on their minds.
• Intex shipped 2.0m smartphones in Q1 15A compared to Micromax’s 3.2m, giving it a reasonable chance of success as long as it puts the full weight of its resources and distribution behind this idea.
• An experiment at small scale is almost certain to fail.