any claimed to acquire 100M subscribers from India. This was the time when smartphone market was booming in India and predatory pricing strategy of Jio had brought down internet data cost to abjectly low level. In 2016, 35 million Indians had smartphones, a gigantic number by any estimation and it seemed as if a giant door was opening itself for Netflix. This was the time when urbanization was rampant and more and more Indians were asking for break from lifeless, trite TV soap contents. Streaming services like Hotstar had already made its mark by providing a cocktail of contents which included movies, cricket. TV shows and other regional content. Although Hotstar had acquired a good market share, it provided content which were highly localized and also lacked essence of a true streaming service. India was waiting for something like Netflix- a service meant for streaming, only streaming. But alas! India proved to be a tough market for Netflix.

Why Netflix didn’t fly as it had hoped when launched in 2016?

SWOT analysis of Netflix in India

Strength

-          Strong brand equity

-          High quality streaming content

-          Big pockets

-          Recent focus on creating original Indian contents

Weakness

-          High subscription price

-          Small segmentation and targeting

-          Predominantly English content

-          Lack of original Indian content

Opportunity

-          Huge smartphone user base

-          Cheap data price

-          Rapid urbanization and change in life style

-          Decline in the quality of Indian TV content

Threats

-          Competition from Hotstar, Amazon and other streaming services

-          No entry barrier in the market, advent of new and cheap streaming services

Netflix managed to bring in only 1% of the 23.78 million members it added worldwide in 2017. SWOT analysis provides us an insight which can be analysed to explain why Netflix is struggling in India. One of the glaring reasons is extremely premium pricing of Netflix in a country whose per capita income is 1/9 of the USA. On an average, Netflix charges 300% more from its consumers compared to industry average. That’s a lot of money Netflix is asking for half of the content it offers in US. This pricing strategy obviously excludes a large chunk of population who could have been its potential customers. Other than that Netflix doesn’t yet offer specialized content for Indian population like it does in other countries. India still is a majorly Hindi speaking nation and it’d be tough for Netflix to catapult its market share unless it pulls in these segments of society. Competition for services like Hotstar is also a big challenge which is winning over the market by providing news, sports and other contents.

Netflix needs to up its game to thrive in India.