“A band without a display is like a car without wheels!” claimed Rahul Sharma, CEO of Yu, when announcing the Micromax subsidiary’s first entry into the fitness band market, the YuFit. Shots were fired. Let’s face it, one would need to wear a special tin foil hat to not draw similarities between the YuFit and the Mi band. Not only do they look similar, they share the same price tag as well. All this, after launching the Yu Yuphoria, a direct competitor to the Redmi 2. Previously, in our interview with Rahul Sharma, the introduction of Yu smartphones was shrugged off as “adapting to new market realities”, which is somewhat true, but with the announcements of Yuphoria and the YuFit, it has become clear that they are taking the “Yu vs Mi” rivalry to the next level.
To understand this rivalry, let’s recollect the similarities and differences between the two that make them direct rivals in the Indian smartphone market –
Mono-syllable 2-letter brands
Xiaomi, when debuting in India, pointed out in their presentation, that they are going to be just a monosyllable “Mi”, for easier pronunciation and better reach. Later, when it was revealed that Micromax’s subsidiary will be called “Yu” with a tagline of “Yu play god”, one couldn’t help but wonder if it was intentional to have a similar two-letter monosyllable, which sounded like “you” while the former sounded like “me”.
Online-only flash sales
Motorola might have kick-started the concept of online-only sales in India, but flash sales are a derivative of Xiaomi’s success in Chinese and Singaporean flash sales. Yu, like many other companies, now follows the same flash sales model and sells its phone only on e-commerce partner-giant Amazon’s Indian website. Xiaomi started out exclusively with Flipkart, ironically a rival to Yu’s partner, but now they have deals in place to sell their devices, not only on other e-commerce platforms, but even offline. Yu is still exclusively online.
Selling at cost
Pricing is the major reason why both of them are successful and they know it too well. The online-only flash sales model lets them spend next to nothing for distribution and also makes marketing for the online-only digital natives easy and cheap. So, the devices, which are vehicles for their “internet-based services” are sold at cost. This was pioneered by Xiaomi, and was quickly lapped up by other companies like Yu. It is imperative to note that both Xiaomi and Yu call themselves “internet and services” companies.
Based on custom Android ROMs
CyanogenMod and MIUI have been servicing power users for a long time in the Android world. MIUI became popular enough to have its own hardware, and is now an entirely different vertically-integrated company. Cyanogen OS, built on CM, wants to be an evolved version of Android that provides third party players an unbiased platform. Ironic that it had to be Cyanogen that Yu chose, but the fit is natural.
Not just smartphones
Xiaomi is building a range of devices that are connected to the internet, most of them in partnership with other companies. They now directly or indirectly make dropcam-like smart surveillance cameras, go pro-like action cameras, smart power sockets, air purifiers, fitness bands and a lot more. Yu has just entered into the world of health accessories that are powered by mobile and they too have gone the investment route, for partnering with a company called HealthifyMe that will power their platform. The distribution model remains the same and is marketed to online-only digital natives. This is where Yu differentiates itself from Micromax, as an “internet and services” company, but lacks a definite goal and purpose. For example, it doesn’t have its own cloud service like Mi, yet.
The similarities end with business models, but we, the consumers, are all about the products, which happen to be their major differentiators. The YuFit band costs the same price as a Mi band, but, with an OLED screen, offers more functionality. One of my major pain points with the Redmi 2 was that the 1 GB of RAM was not enough and the 2 GB variant was not out yet. Guess how many GBs of RAM the Yuphoria has? It’s a rhetorical question, you would already know. It wouldn’t be surprising if Xiaomi comes out with the 2 GB variant soon. The Redmi 2 and the Redmi Note now have many direct rivals, and they will be coming for the Mi4i too, it’s only a matter of time.
But all of this is healthy competition, which is great for us. The companies will keep trying to 1up each other, providing us with more choices in the same price range. Yes, it sometimes makes our decision-making harder, but where’s the fun in easy decision making? For an extremely personal device like the smartphone, it’s great to have choice and that is why we need competition. For all we know, Yu vs Mi could be the next Samsung vs Apple rivalry, which gave us unicorns like large screen iPhones and metallic Samsung phones.