New Delhi | Jagran Technology Desk: In today’s episode of Dainik Jagran’s #NayaBharat series, Jagran HiTech editor Siddhartha Sharma is joined by Jayant Jha, CEO and co-founder of Yaantra, where he talked about the affect of coronavirus on the mobile phone industry and challenges faced by it during this lockdown.
Siddhartha Sharma - My first question to you is that what changes have we seen in the service sector during the lockdown and what has been the effect in the business especially in the smartphone repairing services?
Jayant Jha - During the lockdown, you can say that your closest friend was a mobile phone. During this time, there is still a complete lockdown in many parts of the country and the relaxations received are a limited and within these two months there are a lot of users whose phone has been damaged, they cannot get their phone fixed. It is estimated that there are about 5 million phones in India that need repair .. People will try to get them repaired in the coming days .. This is the biggest effect this lockdown has put on the smartphone industry, especially on services.
Siddhartha Sharma - You mentioned 50 lakh phones, there were so many phones, what is the impact on the service sector, how have you managed it?
Jayant Jha - See what you are talking about against the tide, the most important thing right now is how do we keep ourselves safe and how we can get out of this crisis and as far as businesses are concerned, the question is that a lot of challenges are going to come during this lockdown. When it comes to smartphone repair, components come from China, which is an important part of this industry. You can see that since December, a kind of dip started appearing in the supply chain of the components of the smartphone, so the supply chain was slowly reducing and for the last 90 days it is negligible. I think it will take a long time to re-arrange it as before. This is a very important challenge that has to be solved as quickly as possible. See smartphone industry gives jobs to a lot of people and in that country you will see those who are skilled technicians who know how to repair smartphones, From there to high-tech manufacturing within the country, whether it is Foxconn's plant that manufactures for Xiaomi and Apple, or which Lava, Vivo, Oppo are some Indian brands that manufacture in Noida, Greater Noida. So this sector creates a huge employment in our country. If you talk about Yaantra, we provide independent services ourselves on mobile phones and we have some 1,000 employees across the country who are involved in this business. It will be very important to focus on this sector and things should be normalized as soon as possible so that people's lives can become normal.
Siddhartha Sharma - How will we see the business shift ahead within the service sector? Will there be new business models to be seen in the mobile phone servicing sector?
Jayant Jha - See, it will become very important that when you give your phone to a service center for repair and it stays there for some time, then a lot of questions will remain in the minds of customers that how you can solve it. In the future, the business model, such as Yaantra, has just started contactless repair service, in which we are in our workforce, we are training engineers to go to the customers home and repair their phones there. See, what will be the most important business model is that we can provide risk free services to the people. Like now you also talk about stores or which are service centers, If you have ever been to a smartphone service repair center, then you will get a very long queue there. At least at one time you will get 25-30 people there at one time. I think it is going to be a big challenge, because people will not be preferable to go to places where a lot of people are gathering together. So there can be many ways such as bringing an online appointment system. In which you want to visit a store, then first you have to take an online appointment. But what I think is most important is that the company should just focus on providing services in the most convenient way to the customers, then I think that the door step service repair model is that the availability of customers should increase in the coming time and It will be beneficial for the customer as well as for the brands.
Siddhartha Sharma - The government has come out with a relief package for SME's and MSME's which also captures the service sector in a way, so what is your opinion about that?
Jayant Jha - See, the qualification criterion of MSME is that I think many companies come in it, they will definitely get a lot of help from it. But the companies which do not qualify for MSME which are slightly bigger like you might have seen that the rule is that if your revenue is within 100 crores rupees then you qualify for MSME, so for a big company like that is almost double the size of Yaantra, so we do not qualify in it but those who qualify for it will be of great help. There is a huge area in the services, it provides service through the Moment Box Source, somewhere like the brand Authorized Service Center, they also work on quite a franchise model. The relief package that I think is going to help all those people.
Siddhartha Sharma - Lastly Jayant, I would like to ask you that one of your messages which you think will take us to a new India.
Jayant Jha - I have always felt that the people of India are very innovative, you must have seen that we always take out cost effective, simple solutions and the most important thing is that the people of our country are very hardworking. They take the initiative and try to move forward. We all are facing this problem for the first time, none of us have seen such a situation or resolved any of it, so the most important thing is to recover from it as soon as possible, and try to bring the things back to normal. We have take a step forward and think how we can solve this problem. I think that we are moving forward to build a new India and every problem has an opportunity hidden in it. We have all seen that a lot of manufacturing units are coming to India. I think that we should stay more careful and alert in the coming 30 to 60 days. But we should keep in mind that if we work hard in the coming times, things will become normal soon.
Posted By: Talib Khan
