Its true. QMobile is still the largest seller of smartphones in Pakistan.
This is a perfect story of how a local company can actually surpass international giants by just understanding its customers better than the multinational companies.
Its a story of a company that understood the demand, the preferences and the mindset of the local customer better. That is why it broke sales records time after time.
Not to mention, QMobile has more than 60% market share in Pakistan’s smartphone industry, that’s more than double of its nearest competitor.
Here’s what most people don’t get behind Qmobile’s success. If you think that it was just the price, that played a role in its success, that in itself is clearly not the whole picture.
While price is one major factor, its actually the feature set of its products — packed with an affordable price tag — that did the trick.
The right feature set, right price, right time and the right communication helped QMobile to become what it has become today.
QMobile’s old employees tell me that it wasn’t simple at all. They work for weeks and weeks to identify the specifications, get them packed in a model, and then spend more weeks to get them working — by resolving compatibility issues — on Pakistani cellular networks.
They tell me that one model launch takes several months of R&D before its launched in the market. And to put this into context, imagine the time and effort QMobile puts in while considering the number of models they launch every month.
While many may not pick QMobile as their preferred smartphone, which is totally understandable as they may trust Samsung, Hauwei, Apple more, the reality is that the company has served more customers during the past decade than anyone else by connecting millions of Pakistanis through its affordable smartphones.
It was actually QMobile that made the massive uptake of 3G users possible, as it lowered the entry barrier for smartphone users. It played a huge role in taking it to a level that it didn’t take much time for Pakistanis to cross 40 million wireless broadband users within a period of just three years.
For a country like Pakistan, where affordability remains a major hurdle for service consumption, QMobile played a key role in moving the market. While it will be hard to estimate the impact it made on Pakistan’s GDP (through internet adoption), you can safely assume that it was amongst the top vital players who played a key role in the emergence of services such as Careem and Uber.
With more than 60% market share, QMobile has created more jobs than any competition and employs countless distribution, retail and service partners across the country.
And tell you what, QMobile says its just the beginning!
