As we have highlighted previously in our insights two key trends which are disrupting the incumbent mobile value chain players from operators to device manufacturers:

1. OTT players are growing faster, powerful and developing their own ecosystem to lock-in the users and getting greater share of user’s digital lives and digital wallet & are getting into hardware space

2. Open platforms such as Cyanogen & Sailfish are leveraging this trend and opening up platforms partnering with these OTT players to grow in this mobile industry

• In light of this, Jolla has partnered with Intex one of the fastest growing and third largest smartphone brand in India to launch its first Sailfish OS based phone Intex Aqua Fish in India.
• This will be a pure Intex branded smartphone with design elements sourced and contributed from Jolla team.
• The phone unlike other Aqua series Android phones actually runs Jolla’s Sailfish OS 2 and comes with hero spots and deeper integration with content and commerce partners and has access to more than 100,000 Android apps from a third party Android stores plus natively designed Sailfish apps
• The commerce partner is Snapdeal, one of the top e-commerce platforms in India and the content partner being “Times Internet” one of the largest content and media houses in India with deeper integration for their e-commerce platform and the media streaming app “Gaana” which is one of the top music streaming apps in India. Gaana has more than 10 million MAUs and can be called India’s Spotify.
• This is essentially a “Snapdeal” phone or “Gaana” phone and we look forward to see many such combinations moving forward.
• This opens up a new business model approach where OTT players are getting more focus, hero spots with tighter integration than it would have got on platforms such as iOS or Android where Apple and Google have their own competing services
• This is another HaaD model approach as we discussed earlier, which will challenge the incumbents as these devices will be aggressively priced and offering extra value beyond hardware specs or design.
• Jolla offers the Sailfish OS license free but will make money with “revenue sharing” model as the users use the popular OTT services which are deeply integrated into Sailfish devices
• This is a huge gap which Jolla is trying to fill with open Sailfish Alliance which can be scaled with local hardware partners, local content partners for different geographies in mid- to long-term.
• Jolla expects more than 15 OEMs in a few years to ship Sailfish based open devices and diverse content, commerce partner base
• Jolla looks forward to push this strategy to high growth, low penetrated and huge scale BRICs markets than pursing in operator driven mature markets in Europe and North America