Over time, the idea is to integrate all e-commerce services. It’s still early days for the so-called Open Network for Digital Commerce, which is in talks to onboard over 200 companies and is being piloted in 30 cities. In e-commerce, New Delhi wants Big Tech to back a new digital infrastructure inspired by its wildly successful interoperable payments system. An exit will hurt consumers used to highly-competitive entry level handsets and leaves South Korea’s Samsung Electronics as the main beneficiary. The market may be growing at a double digit pace, but Chinese manufacturers could still walk away Xiaomi’s Indian unit reported a net profit margin of less than 1% in the year to March 2021. Xiaomi and Vivo, for example, have made large investments to answer Prime Minister Narendra’s Modi’s call to make, or at least assemble goods, in India. It’s a common complaint against foreign companies, and suggests the issue goes beyond geopolitics.Īll this muddies the message that India is open for business, threatening annual foreign direct investment which hit a record high of $84 billion in the year to March. But the dispute is messier: New Delhi alleges the companies are illegally moving money offshore on pretext of royalty fees, among other things on Wednesday a government agency accused Vivo of evading $280 million of taxes. Chinese manufacturers are dominant, accounting for three quarters of India’s 168 million shipments in 2021, per Counterpoint Research. On the face of it, New Delhi’s crackdown on smartphone makers also looks motivated by tensions with its neighbour. Beijing, for instance, has tightened rules on foreign-listed Chinese companies housing troves of user data. Like online content regulation, cybersecurity is a growing concern for governments worldwide. India has banned over 300 apps, mostly Chinese, and some games from companies like Sea and Krafton backed by China’s Tencent on national security grounds. India is keeping a close tab on investment from the People’s Republic since a deadly Himalayan border clash in 2020. When it comes to social media, the political ramifications of unfiltered online content mean that companies may have little option but to do things New Delhi’s way. The latter boasts 530 million users in India, the most of any country. Social media giants Twitter and Meta’s WhatsApp are also taking New Delhi to court as operating rules get tougher. At the same time, officials are nudging US firms including to integrate their platforms into a single open and shared network for e-commerce.
GROWING UP SKIPPER AMAZON FREE
In recent months, New Delhi has raided offices of Chinese smartphone makers Xiaomi and Vivo, and banned popular mobile games including Free Fire by Singapore’s Sea and Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) by South Korea’s Krafton.
Official heavy-handedness to address those potential problems could end up having the opposite effect, however. It is, at best, a messy effort to prevent vulnerabilities emerging from its large and growing technology sector. India’s war on foreign technology giants is misunderstood.
0 kommentar(er)
