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Showing posts from July, 2020

Goods and Services Tax (GST)

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Tax is a compulsory financial charge levied on the citizens of a country to finance government's spending. When we earn our salary we pay a portion of it to the govt. based on the tax slab we lie in, called the direct tax while when we eat in a restaurant or order something online, we are levied with a surplus charge on our orders called an indirect tax. Earlier we used to have a very complicated tax system and the same products where sold at different prices in different states like petrol since different states charged different taxes. With the implementation of GST, the indirect tax system has become uniform. Here the GST has 3 parts: i) CGST (Central Goods and Service Tax) collected by the central government. ii)SGST (State Goods and Service Tax)  collected  by the state. iii)IGST (Integrated Goods and Service Tax)  shared  by the central govt. and the destination state when the transaction is inter-state. So, when a good is manufactured and sold in the same state, the central

Indian smartphone market and Chinese brands alternative.

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The Indian smartphone market is about $28.5 Billion as per a 2018 report and a 2019 report indicates an 8% year-over-year growth. In layman's term if last year sales were worth $100 this year's sales will be of $108. As of Jan 2020 report, India's digital population is approximately around 700+ million, 2nd in the world and is rising rapidly supported by cheap data and various government initiatives. Seems quite a big market, isn't it? 4 of the top 5 companies that dominate the Indian smartphone market are Chinese and these top 5 brands capture almost 85-90% of the Indian market share (as of 2019).  Let's see how the US and the global market look like.   Here we observe that Samsung and LG other than Apple are non-Chinese big market players in the smartphone industry. It is found that 30-40% of the smartphones sold in India are in the range of 10k-18k and is the fastest-growing segment. For the matter of mid-range smartphones, Samsung and LG have a huge opportunity