Tablet Sales in India Will Rise Exponentially in 2012

Can you give us a brief overview of the overall tablet market in India? How is the market evolving?

According to Cyber Media Research, the country saw sales of about 475,000 units of media tablets in the last calendar year. We think that the tablet sales will rise exponentially in India in 2012 and will beat estimates of all analysts with millions joining the internet age and tablet sales will be a primary driver in this surge. Datawind alone plans to introduce at least a million tablets this year in India and we expect other players to increase their sales as well.

You have been a proponent of evangelizing the power of the Internet to transform people's lives! Can tablets really help bridge digital divide?

There are 900 million mobile phone subscribers but only 18 million broadband connections are available. This gap segment is our priority. We want to create a product that creates an optimum balance between usability, performance and affordability for the Indian population. The tablets also need to have contents that are relevant to users in India and cater to their unique needs in their local languages. Our priority is to cater to web access and educational needs of the society that is unable to afford computing devices. There is a special focus on students and creating educational content relevant for Indian students and their unique needs. A big majority of India falls in this category. We want to take technology to them and make it relevant in their lives.

Would you like to share any stat on the adoption of tablets by Indian students?

We see education as the primary segment driving the Indian tablet market – but the demand is not only by students; it is also being created by parents, institutions and the government. We see this segment covering over 70% of the market.

Moving to Aakash, the much talked about device, how have the responses been so far on the commercial variants of Aakash?

Commercial version of Aakash is called Ubislate which has two range – Ubislate 7+ and Ubislate 7C have received overwhelming response from the masses. We have received more than 3 million bookings of Ubislate Tablets so far. We have already started deliveries of Ubislate Tablet to the people who had booked online pre-paid.

Aakash drew a lot of flak for its allegedly delayed deliveries and poor performance! Are you working on these issues?

One needs to differential Aakash from Ubislate. You are aware that the public interest in the product is huge and we have received bookings for more than 3 million for Ubislate units. Several tens of thousands of tablets have been delivered to our customers so far. Heavy demands have delayed the supply, but this is also the success of the product and we are making all our efforts to meet the demand as soon as possible.

The first version of Aakash was based on specs intended not to compete with the iPad, but to breakthrough price barriers that the world believed was unachievable. We successfully delivered a product that provided access to Ebooks, HD Video and internet – but instead most people compared its performance with products ten times the price. The first version of Aakash was not based on DataWind’s specifications – but the second version will be. The government will launch Aakash2 based on DataWind’s specs next month – we’re confident of its performance.

What else can we expect from Datawind this year?

We have a number of new products in the pipeline, and expect at least 3 new product introductions before end of year. Our focus is to vary the form factor beyond just 7”. Further details will follow.