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.

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 …

Author

Roshni P. Nair

Roshni is a features writer and former editor of The Morning Context's Chaos team. Her career spans The Ken, Reuters, the Hindustan Times and DNA. She is a recipient of the UNFPA Laadli award and was shortlisted for the RedInk Awards 2016 for her story on Mumbai’s leprosy colonies. Her far-flung ideas would sometimes drive our editor-in-chief Ashish up the wall, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way (even if he didn’t admit it).

roshni@mailtmc.com

Author

Abhishek Baxi

Abhishek writes on technology trends, gadgets and SMBs, and has over a decade of experience—both as an industry watcher as well as a participant. He quit Microsoft in 2011 to become an independent digital consultant, and to write more, travel randomly, watch a lot of movies and wake up late on weekdays.

newsletters+baxi.author@themorningcontext.com