Brightstar, the subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp, the mobile services & technology solutions company. Brightstar entered the Indian market after acquiring a majority stake in Beetel Teletech in 2014.
For Brightstar, India is a crucial market presenting tremendous growth opportunities across technology distribution and associated services in the handset, IT and networking space. In its two years of operations in the Indian market, Brightstar India has seen a phenomenal 300% growth from where it started in 2014. The business is projected to grow at more than 60% for 2017.
“Brightstar believes India to be one of the most promising countries amongst the 100 countries it operates in. We have, and will continue to invest across businesses, systems and in people to win in this market,” said Jaymin B. Patel, Brightstar’s Global President and CEO, during his visit to India last quarter.
To lead the Indian market, Brightstar will continue to focus on the core distribution business, and excel across operations in five segments, Consumer affordability, Business technology, Network solutions, Channel management, Supply chain and Reverse logistics space. Some of the New offerings for 2017-18 are, Financial services like Device Financing, Future Price Commitment, Gadget Insurance and Buy Back & Trade in.
Brightstar is the global leader in future price commitment for mobile handsets, which is a unique value proposition and first of its kind in India. We offer this service with assured Return Value (RVs) on the basis of our robust simulation models. Special focus has been made on the multiple formats in retail, with a device buy back solution. We aim to become the trusted partner creating value for retailers and their customers. With the used phone market estimated to grow at 20 percent annually, Brightstar’s technologically advanced and trusted diagnostic tool offers fair value for “used products”, providing the comfort of best price to the consumer besides using it as an affordable tool to buy new products.
With significant investments in telecom over the last few years, cloud services have become more accessible to the mid-market segment. Cloud services are expected to be worth approximately $6 billion market by 2020. Brightstar will focus on the $2 billion+ SMB cloud market opportunity by 2020. Brightstar’s cloud solutions in SaaS and PaaS will provide strong offerings in and around “Video as a Service”, “Contact Center as a Service” and “Wi -Fi as a Service”.
In Network Solutions, we will focus on the Mid-Market segment (SMB) and access network solutions to increase data penetration affordably in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Brightstar also aims to enter the surveillance market soon. This is a new but rapidly growing sector estimated to be worth $300 mn by 2020, with a projected growth of 43% over the next three years. There are few organized solution providers for surveillance products and an early mover will certainly reap the benefits.
Brightstar retains the Beetel landline phone product range, which continues to dominate the segment with above 75% market share. The company plans to take this range to various emerging markets soon.
The company has invested in building leadership from across industries including telecom, IT, retail, banking, and logistics to build in internal capabilities to deliver on its goals. With global expertise of handling emerging markets, Brightstar looks to provide customer focused solutions simplifying the business needs.
“2017 is an inflexion point for the Indian telecom and IT industries. To capitalize on this change, Brightstar has made a shift from ‘selling products’ to ‘providing solutions’ for its end customers across retail, online, enterprise and networking. We want to make the complicated simple!” says Deval Parikh, CEO Brightstar India.
