India 2 • Nuclear Bits

Apple reports "all-time revenue record" from India

Apple reported their quarterly results for Q4’22 yesterday and the folks at Six Colors have published their transcript of the call that Tim Cook and Luca Maestri have with analysts.

During the call, Apple mentioned that the company saw double-digit grown in India and iPhone growth was “impressive”.

iPhone Revenue grew 10% year over year to a September quarter record of 42.6 billion despite significant foreign exchange headwinds. We set September quarter records in the vast majority of markets we track, and our performance was particularly impressive in several large emerging markets with India setting a new all-time revenue record and Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Mexico more than doubling year over year. Thanks to our strong iPhone lineup, we set a quarterly record for upgraders and grew switchers double digits. This level of sales performance, along with unmatched customer loyalty, drove the active installed base of iPhones to a new all time high across all geographic segments.

(Emphasis mine.)

No surprises here. The iPhone continues to get more expensive in India, yet more people continue to buy it every year.

October 28, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Uber is testing EV cabs in Delhi NCR

Jagmeet Singh, writing for TechCrunch:

Uber has started offering electric vehicles to customers in certain parts of the Delhi-NCR region and says it will be expanding its efforts over the coming months. The electric cabs are currently only available for pre-scheduled trips.

The company did not share how many EV cabs were operational on its platform in India, but insisted that it is working with multiple fleet partners, OEMs and charging infra providers “to gradually build the EV business in a sustainable manner.”

With fuel prices soaring in the country, Uber’s contractual drivers have already been raising their displeasure at making less than what the company had promised them. I just hope that the company doesn’t shaft them like they did with the ICE vehicles.

October 21, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Tinder's Parent Match Sues Apple in India

Aditya Kalra, reporting for Reuters:

Tinder-owner Match Group has filed an antitrust case against Apple with the competition regulator in India, accusing it of “monopolistic conduct” that forces developers to pay high commissions for in-app purchases, a legal filing seen by Reuters shows.

Apple is fending off a raft of antitrust challenges around the globe and Match’s July filing adds to two other cases in India though Match is the first foreign company to mount such a challenge against the iPhone maker in the country.

Match notes in its filing that Indians prefer using a “state-backed online transfer system,” seemingly referring to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment system promoted by the Indian Govt. that has swept the country in recent times.

The govt. has repeatedly shown how much it loves UPI, and if that’s any indication, Apple just might be in some trouble here.

August 27, 2022 ✚ Permalink

India Seizes $46m from Crypto Exchange Vauld

Manish Singh, writing on Techcrunch:

Flipvolt Technologies, the India registered entity of Singapore-headquartered Vauld, was used to deposit 3.7 billion Indian rupees by 23 entities including non-banking financial companies and fintech firms into the wallets controlled by Yellow Tune Technologies, the Enforcement Directorate said Friday of its ongoing investigation.

The agency said the Indian entity of Vauld maintains “very lax KYC norms, no EDD mechanism, no check on the source of funds of the depositors, no mechanism of raising STRs, etc,” factors that led the accused firms in “avoiding regular banking channels” and “easily take out all the fraud money in the form of crypto assets.”

The Indian government has generally been against cryptocurrency, and cases like these are ensuring that doesn’t change for a long time.

August 12, 2022 ✚ Permalink

ExpressVPN Removes VPN Servers in India

ExpressVPN has just announced that they will be removing their physical servers located in India, refusing to comply with India’s new VPN law.

With a recent data law introduced in India requiring all VPN providers to store user information for at least five years, ExpressVPN has made the very straightforward decision to remove our Indian-based VPN servers.

Rest assured, our users will still be able to connect to VPN servers that will give them Indian IP addresses and allow them to access the internet as if they were located in India. These “virtual” India servers will instead be physically located in Singapore and the UK.

Under the new VPN law that is set to come into effect on Jun 27, 2022, the company states that they will be “required to store users’ real names, IP addresses assigned to them, usage patterns, and other identifying data” which effectively “is incompatible with the purpose of VPNs, which are designed to keep users’ online activity private.”

The law is also overreaching and so broad as to open up the window for potential abuse. We believe the damage done by potential misuse of this kind of law far outweighs any benefit that lawmakers claim would come from it.

ExpressVPN refuses to participate in the Indian government’s attempts to limit internet freedom. As a company focused on protecting privacy and freedom of expression online, we will continue to fight to keep users connected to the open and free internet with privacy and security, no matter where they are located.

ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN services in the market today and I had been a customer for a while, only switching to Mullvad because I wanted the flexibility in billing. I am certain that other VPN companies are going to follow in the same steps. Any company that doesn’t, is a company worth staying away from.

June 2, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Apple India Hiring for a Number of Apple Retail Roles as it Prepares to Launch Apple Stores in Mumbai & New Delhi

Apple is inching close to launching the country’s first Apple Stores, with the first one opening soon in the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai, followed closely by a second one opening in New Delhi. Apple India has been working on bringing its stores to Indian shores for a really long time now — as early as 2014 — and some of the recent developments indicate that the launch could happen very soon, as early as January 2022. The company already launched the Apple Online Store in India a little over a year ago.

The company has begun hiring for a number of roles in Apple Retail, such as Store Leader, Genius, Specialist, Technical Special, Senior Manager, Manager, Operations Expert, Market Leader, Expert, Creative, Business Pro, Business Expert, etc. All of these Apple Retail roles are available in Mumbai, Maharashtra as well as in New Delhi.

It’s important to note that for many of these roles, Apple is seeking individuals interested in working part-time or contractual-basis, in addition to full-time. The job listings indicate that candidates can even apply to work only for a few hours on weekends, giving a few hours every week towards the role.

It’ll be interesting to see what strategy the company chooses to follow in India, where its product-line has always been seen as “overpriced” and yet has seen an upward trend in adoption, especially iPhones. I’m also curiously excited to see what changes the company brings to its hardware repair & support experience, which is currently offered through third-party resellers and is generally considered disappointing.

[Featured Image by Andy Wang]

November 17, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Twitter Brings Communities to India and Rolls Out Live Cricket Scorecards

Vikas SN, writing for Moneycontrol:

Twitter has extended its Communities feature to India with the launch of a Cricket-focused community called Cricket Twitter-India that will enable users to talk all things cricket in multiple Indian languages.

The launch comes as the T20 Cricket World Cup officially kicks off later this week.

and

Live cricket scorecards will be available on the Sports tab of Twitter’s discovery-focused Explore page. These scores will also continue to appear on event pages during a match, so that users “can follow the conversation and the scores in real time”, the company said.

Twitter said that more than 75 million conversations were just about cricket on the platform between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021.

The Communities feature on Twitter is quite confusing to me, largely because I think it’s being shoehorned into a platform not meant for such a thing. However, I do think that if Twitter opens up the feature to more cricket-loving Indians, they might see a much wider adoption and hopefuly tweak the feature so that it feels part of the overall Twitter experience.

October 21, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Vi's Last Stand

I missed this story from August by Pratap Vikram Singh, writing for The Ken:

Vi, India’s third largest telco, is on the verge of closure. Things reached a head when a letter from promoter Kumar Mangalam Birla to a govt official was leaked

and

The letter, dated 7 June, was sent from Aditya Birla Group chairperson Kumar Mangalam Birla to Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba. In it, Birla pleaded for “immediate active support” from the government. Without this, he warned, the telco would be driven to “an irretrievable point of collapse.” Birla even offered to hand over his 27% stake in the company to the government or any entity chosen by it in order to ensure the company, India’s third largest telco, remained a going concern. Later media reports indicated that Vi had also conveyed this message to banks.

I can’t imagine how Vi is planning to survive in the market so excellently dominated by Airtel and Jio. Not only is Vi’s network piss-poor, their customer support isn’t any better either. And to make matters worse, the merger of Vodafone and Idea was like a self-inflicted leg wound in the midst of a 100m sprint.

October 11, 2021 ✚ Permalink