Reuters Story: India's push for home-grown navigation system jolts smartphone giants. New Delhi wants tech giants to make smartphones compatible with its NavIC system within months, worrying the likes of Samsung, Xiaomi & Apple. Here are all the details reut.rs ๐งต
First, what is NavIC? India has over the years expanded the use of its regional navigation satellite system NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation). India wants to reduce dependence on foreign systems, including the widely used U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS)
But NavIC's uptake has been minimal so far. Today, @Reuters is reporting government documents that show India wants to broaden its use and has been pushing smartphone giants to make hardware changes to support NavIC, in addition to GPS, in new phones from January 2023
That has concerned the industry. In private meetings in August and September, representatives of Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung pushed back, citing worries that making phones NavIC-compliant would mean higher research and production costs. They want timeline to be extended to 2025.
Samsung told govt officials: "This would add to cost as it requires hardware design changes and additional investments to support devices specific to India. Further, the companies have already prepared for models to be launched in 2024."
What are smartphone execs worried about? A key concern for likes of Samsung/Xiaomi remains the higher cost of so-called dual band chipsets they would need to support both GPS and NavIC, as these companies are leaders in the sub-$200 category in India's price-sensitive market
For procuring NavIC-compliant chipsets, most smartphone makers are reliant on global giants such as U.S. chip designer Qualcomm and Taiwan's MediaTek. But voluntary use of such chipsets has been limited in India as phone manufacturers remain hesitant to add the extra components
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