At IQ India 2012 , I got a chance to sit down with Anand Chandrasekher , Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) , Qualcomm Inc. Anand joined Qualcomm in August 2012 after a long 24 year stint at Intel. I asked Anand about Snapdragon , Qualcomm’s marketing strategy and why should a consumer buy a Snapdragon powered phone.Watch the full video interview below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esOudBwRqtw
Full text of Anand Chandrasekher’s interview with FoneArena
Varun: Hi, this is Varun Krish from FoneArena here. And here we have Anand Chandrasekher from Qualcomm at IQ 2012 . Hi Anand, how are you doing?
Anand: Very good, Varun. Thank you for having me, it’s a great pleasure to be here.
Varun: How is it to be a part of Qualcomm? How long since you joined here?
Anand: I joined Qualcomm in August of 2012 and it’s great to be here, it’s a fantastic team. It’s my first trip to India on behalf of Qualcomm, very happy to be here, and very happy to see the developments in the marketplace. My role effectively is all marketing activities for Qualcomm, right, so it’s looking over all the external facing activities for the company.
Varun: Snapdragon already has a lot of competition from Nvidia, Intel and a lot more. So, what are your thoughts on the competition?
Anand: Well, I think, consumers are very smart. Consumers tend to know and be able to differentiate good technologies and great technologies and Qualcomm has a fantastic product offering with Snapdragon because it is not just a modem, it’s also a great CPU, it’s also a great graphics processor, and ultimately you have to put that all together, to deliver a product that has great battery life and consumers want a smartphone which has superb performance, but also superb battery life. So, we invest first and foremost in the technology to make it a fantastic product and then we do our best to communicate the benefits of that product to our consumers, so, we will do that and mostly what you will see us do is, accelerate our activities and talk more about why our products are as good as they are, and ultimately hope the consumer makes the smart choice and that choice being the Qualcomm choice.
Varun: Lot of players have tried to replicate their success in the PC space into the mobile space like for example, Intel, you have Microsoft with Windows 8. How do you think it works out for them?
Anand: Well I think the PC space, PC and mobile are two completely different domains. Both have very powerful ecosystems going with them, but they are separate ecosystems and the learning from the two ecosystems, while there are learnings that translate to the other, they are also different enough I think you have to treat the mobile ecosystem as a unique ecosystem of its own. So companies that will effectively take advantage of the mobile ecosystem on its own merits and on its own recognition I think will do well.
Varun: You spoke about Indian market being exciting, so how is the Indian market being exciting for you, can you describe it?
Anand: Indian market’s always been exciting. India’s economy has been growing leaps and bounds in many fronts. Particularly from a cellphone and from a smartphone perspective, India’s extraordinarily exciting. 2011 is being the first year where smartphone shipments exceeded the sales of PCs, both desktops and laptops/notebooks combined, makes it even more exciting. That’s sort of forward looking, it’s a very exciting market.
Varun: Why should the consumer buy a Snapdragon powered phone?
Anand: *laughs* My answer to that is simple, Varun. Consumers should buy a Snapdragon based phone because it is the best phone that they can buy, period. It’s simple.
Do you plan to make Snapdragon a household name?
Anand: Well, I don’t know that we will make it a household name but what we would like to be able to do is, consumers are preferentially seeking products that feature Qualcomm’s best product in it, and our best product happens to be a Snapdragon.
On Dual-Core vs Quad-Core and Power Management?
Anand: This is an issue that’s been there for some time, and it’s coming to smartphones now. But certainly the issue of cores, the appropriate number of cores is also an issue that the industry dealt within the PC side, if you remember right. And the learning from the PC side is the consumer is very smart. Consumer knows when the cores are able to deliver a real benefit and the cores are simply there for a marketing benefit. And the reality is, with Krait, our single core performs a lot better than any of our competitors’ dual cores and our dual cores perform better than our competitors’ quad cores and our quad core basically is the fastest thing there today. And as I said, in a smartphone, the key thing is performance per watt, because the battery life has to be optimal, regardless of how many cores you have there. So, we are very comfortable with our product offering and again, we put the best product out there and we think the consumers are smart; they will make the right choice.
Are you happy with Snapdragon’s market performance?
Anand: We are quite happy with the performance of Snapdragon and from a market presence standpoint. Many of our customers are using it. Some of our latest phones have many of our products featured in them, and they do beautifully from a performance standpoint and from a battery life standpoint and like what I said earlier, consumers that choose their phone based on Snapdragon will be happy with their choice.
Varun: Ok Anand, it was great talking to you, thanks for your time.
Anand: Thank you Varun, pleasure, likewise.