boAt on song, but will it rock the desi beat?
The homegrown audio and wearable products brand has tasted success and raised $100 million in funding recently. The question is whether it will manage to keep competition at bay, decouple from China and ride the made-in-India wave.
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Editor's note: If you travel by Delhi Metro, take a local train in Mumbai or even walk into a college campus bustling with students, you won’t need analyst reports to tell you just how far audio and wearable products manufacturer boAt has come. Its products, especially earphones, are ubiquitous. Validation, if any is required, comes from a report put out by market research firm IDC, according to which boAt commands over 30% of the wearables market in India and is now the fifth-largest brand globally in the category (for an audio device to count in IDC’s “wearables'' definition, it must offer functionality beyond audio, like a smart assistant, audio experience enhancement, etc.). Another report from technology market analysis firm Canalys proclaims boAt to be the top smart personal audio (Canalys’s term for wireless headphones) brand in the country. While these reports from 2020 saw boAt grab some serious mindshare, earlier this month, the startup raised $100 million from Warburg Pincus, a New York-headquartered global private equity firm. The round gives boAt a $300 million valuation, leading most analysts to peg it as …
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