5G, fixed wireless service from Jio, Airtel to drive smart TV growth: Xiaomi India president

High-speed 5G network and fixed wireless service offered by Jio and Airtel will drive growth of smart television in the country, Chinese smart device maker Xiaomi's top official said.

Xiaomi India President Muralikrishnan B told PTI that the second half of 2024 is going to be the biggest after a long period, starting from Independence Day to Rakhi to Onam and now headed towards Diwali coupled with the cricket World Cup tournament. "We see an amazing opportunity to gain more market share, the next three to six months is a fantastic opportunity to gain more traction in smart television. We are optimistic that Smart TV is in India," Muralikrishnan said. According to Counterpoint research, Xiaomi led the Indian smart television market with 10 per cent market share in the first half of 2023. He said it is important to have a good home broadband connection for a good smart TV viewing, especially for videos with 4K resolution. "It's a fact that many parts of the country did not have good fibre reaching the home.

Now with 5G and fixed wireless access, and all the fibre solutions that Airtel and Jio are going to execute, we will have high quality bandwidth coming into home. In limited urban clusters, you had fibre to the home. That is another reason why the smart TV market will grow even further," Muralikrishnan said. Both Airtel and Reliance Jio have rolled out fixed wireless broadband services as AirFiber that will provide 5G kind of speed wirelessly inside homes. Jio has announced speeds of 30 megabit per second (Mbps) to 1,000 Mbps on AirFiber while Airtel is offering 100 Mbps plans in select cities. Muralikrishnan said that during the cricket World Cup of 2019 there was high demand for ultra-high definition smart TVs, but in this festive season, the company expects the demand for higher resolution 4K smart TV to rise.

"This Diwali, we are actually hoping that 4K will have a huge play in the market. People are now moving to bigger screen sizes, because when you have 4K, you need a much larger big screen experience. Of course, 55 and 65-inch screens will grow but just from price points, 43 inch is rising in demand," he said. Muralikrishnan said the shift in television space in India is as consumer's shift from sub-Rs 10,000 smartphones to sub-Rs 15,000 smartphones. He said that the company was clear that the Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 price segment is going to be the sweet spot for 5G smartphones. "I think that is really paying off and the Redmi 12 series was amongst the fastest to hit 1 million sales in 28 days, which is fantastic.

It is moments like this which will truly catalyse and accelerate 5G adoption in India," Muralikrishnan said. Xiaomi occupied third spot, after Samsung and vivo, with 15 per cent volume market share in the second quarter of this year. Muralikrishnan said that one-third of Xiaomi customers now use more than one product of the company and now the company has a desire that every household in India should use at least one of the Xiaomi's products.

"Now there are perhaps about 240-250 million households in India, some of the more recent studies will probably put it closer to 300 million. Our ambition is that every household in India can have at least one Xiaomi product, be it TV, power bank, security camera, air purifier or anything. That's the grand mission that we would like to execute on," Muralikrishnan said.