ON THE AFTERNOON OF 22 JULY LAST YEAR, around 200,000 people in India logged on to the website of the e-commerce company Flipkart and watched closely as a timer ticked down to 2 pm. The Chinese electronics company Xiaomi’s first sale in India was about to begin. Customers had heard about the “flash sale,” of the company’s Mi 3 smartphone, through news outlets, online forums and social media; Xiaomi doesn’t do paid advertising anywhere in the world, and it hadn’t done any ahead of its launch in India either. The phone was being sold exclusively through Flipkart, and, as with all the company’s flash sales, interested buyers had to register with the site starting a week before the sale.
When the timer hit zero, a “Buy Now” button appeared onscreen. Of the thousands who clicked it to make their purchase, some were directed to a follow-up page. But many were greeted with error messages, forcing them to return to the sale’s home page and try again. Customers persisted until 40 minutes later, when they saw a message that the phone was out of stock.
A week later, on 29 July, Xiaomi held its second sale, of the same phone, following the same process. Many who hoped that things would run more smoothly, and that more phones would be available, were in for a disappointment—website errors abounded again, and this time, the phone was declared out of stock in just five seconds.
News of the flash sales, and of stocks running out in seconds, made for great publicity. But Xiaomi’s potential customer base was growing irritated. Some vented their frustrations on social media and on blogs, complaining about confusing instructions for the sale. “Xiaomi makes a mockery of Mi 3 sales,” read the headline of a Times of India piece that collated some angry responses. “Can’t believe it. Mi3 sold out in just 2 minutes. Xiaomi, u r joking wid us, right? Do reveal d actual number of units sold during d sale!” read one tweet. “I say don’t treat your potential customers as dogs fighting for food..meet the demands not the hype,” read another. Many complained that the company was trying to spin a poorly planned sale into a success story.
A spokesperson for the company told me that the duration of the sales were calculated based on the time taken for buyers to add the products to their carts. Manu Jain, Xiaomi’s India head, admitted that the glitches in the sales owed to inadequate planning on the company’s part. “We didn’t expect it,” he told me over the phone last month. “We genuinely underestimated the demand.”
Jain said that Xiaomi dealt with the problems transparently, and worked to rectify issues of supply and sales service. “We were really honest about it, unlike most companies,” he said. Over the months, he said, the company ramped up imports to try and meet the massive demand for its phones in India. “We’ve made a huge effort to do that week on week,” he said, adding that the company’s weekly sales are now are as much as ten times higher than when it entered the Indian market last year. But Xiaomi is still some way off from meeting demand. “Until we can manage to get this supply–demand equilibrium,” Jain said, declining to offer a specific time frame for achieving this target, “we will continue with the flash-sale model.”
The rush in India for Xiaomi’s smartphones is not surprising, given the country’s growing appetite for these devices. Though traditional feature phones—which retail for as low as Rs 800, and whose use is mostly limited to making phone calls and sending text messages—still command a 70-percent share of India’s cell phone market, they are increasingly losing ground to smartphones. The International Data Corporation, a market research firm with a specific interest in telecommunications, predicts that smartphones will eclipse feature phones in India by mid 2016 and estimates that the latter’s share will become “very negligible” by the end of 2018.
IDC data show that sales of smartphones in India are soaring. According to a November report, of the 72.5 million phones shipped to India in the quarter ending last September, 32 percent, or 23 million, were smartphones. That figure is around 79 percent higher than the corresponding total from a year ago, of 12.8 million. In contrast, the smartphone market in China grew by just 11 percent during the same period. According to the report, India’s smartphone market is the fastest growing among the Asia-Pacific countries, including China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. In absolute numbers, China’s smartphone market still dwarfs India’s: according to IDC, 351 million smartphones were shipped to China in 2013, while 44 million were shipped to India in the same year. (Experts track the industry by the number of units shipped, or made available for purchase, as opposed to the number of units sold.) But with sales in India picking up at a much faster pace, the country offers smartphone companies far more appealing prospects for growth.
Xiaomi represents a new kind of player in this market. Most smartphone companies operating in India can be divided between two groups—international ones, such as Samsung, Motorola and Nokia, that already have a global presence and are bolstered by many years of investment and experience; and homegrown competitors, such as Micromax, Karbonn and Lava, that rely primarily on identifying the needs of price-conscious Indian consumers and then fulfilling them with products marketed under their own brand names, but imported from China. In recent years, some of these Indian companies have begun or stepped up their own efforts at research and development.
Xiaomi belongs to a third category, which has only emerged in the last few years. It comprises Chinese brands, such as Oppo, ZTE and Huawei, that have seen success in their home market and are now looking to establish themselves abroad. Xiaomi has been the most visible of these brands, with headline-making flash sales and consistently good consumer reviews. In the Indian market, it straddles the appeal of both its global and Indian competitors. “Xiaomi is attempting to bring the best of both worlds,” Rajat Agrawal, the editor of the technology news portal BGR India told me. “It packages the best hardware specifications, good design, impressive software customisation and a great price.”
While the restricted supply of its phones has so far limited the brand’s share of the Indian market, Xiaomi has significant global resources to back its growth here. In December, during its latest round of fundraising, Xiaomi was valued at $46 billion, making it the world’s most valuable tech startup. In the years to come, Xiaomi will likely use its financial clout to challenge the brands that currently rule in India.
[ II ]
XIAOMI WAS FOUNDED IN APRIL 2010, in Beijing, by the Chinese billionaire Lei Jun, who previously held a variety of interests, including in a software company, a video-based social network and an online fashion-retail portal. Its first product was an operating platform, MIUI (pronounced “me-you-I”), released in August 2010. The platform, based on Google’s open-source Android system, was targeted at Chinese consumers who, because of the country’s ban against the global tech giant, had no access to Google products. Xiaomi actively sought user feedback on MIUI and released regular updates that incorporated requested features, and so established a rapport with its customers that it has since become famous for.
Xiaomi’s appeal became clear in August 2011, when it began taking orders for its first smartphone, the Mi 1, and received more than 300,000 orders within 34 hours, even though the phone was to be dispatched only a few weeks later, in October. From there, Xiaomi’s growth was dizzying: in 2012, it sold 7.2 million phones; in 2013, that figure more than doubled, to 18.7 million; and in 2014, it more than tripled the total from the previous year, selling more than 61.1 million phones. In three years, Xiaomi grew from a fledgling start-up to the third largest smartphone producer in the world, after the behemoths Samsung and Apple, and started drawing the attention of consumers, investors and competitors across the world.
Xiaomi executed a major coup in August 2013, when it hired Hugo Barra, one of Google’s top Android executives, to be its global vice president. “Barra was the face of Android at Google along with Andy Rubin,” Agrawal, the tech-news editor, told me. “He brought in a wealth of knowledge, and Google understanding. Also, for Xiaomi to grow, it had to look at other emerging markets, and Barra brought the necessary experience for helping do that.”
In his first interview afterwards, given to the tech website AllThingsD, Barra described his new position as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, truly a dream job, this idea of building a global company which could be as significant as Google, from the ground up.” He made it clear that Xiaomi’s primary targets were not the affluent countries of the West, but “places like India, Russia, Indonesia, Latin America, Thailand … where the equation of quality and affordability works, because it’s in those markets you can replicate what the company has done in China.”
In February 2014, Xiaomi made its first foray into a market outside the Greater China region with the launch of its Redmi 1S model in Singapore. The sales strategy there was the same the company would use in India, and the stock was sold out in eight minutes. Subsequent reactions also foreshadowed Xiaomi’s Indian experience: commentators could not determine how many phones were sold, and many unsuccessful buyers complained about an inefficient, misleading sale process. Still, the company continued to expand, venturing into Malaysia and the Philippines—like Singapore, relatively small markets—before turning to the vast Indian market in July. “This is a very large country with a very young population that’s quite tech savvy,” Barra told me in one of our meetings, in January, at the Delhi launch of a new model, the Mi 4. To this population the “mobile phone is the gateway to the world,” he said. “It’s an incredible opportunity.”
To head its India operations, Barra said, Xiaomi had been looking for someone who was “entrepreneurial, quantitative, had consumer insights and had the intellectual brain-power to look at things with a new eye.” Experience in the telecom industry was not a priority. Among the leading candidates was Manu Jain, a former executive of the consulting firm McKinsey and co-founder of the online fashion and lifestyle e-commerce portal Jabong. Jain, who was in his early thirties, had grown interested in the smartphone sector, and in Xiaomi in particular, during his time at Jabong. In May 2013, his mentor Naveen Tewari, the founder and chief executive of the mobile advertising company InMobi, introduced Jain to Bin Lin, the president and co-founder of Xiaomi, over email. The two exchanged a few emails, with Bin Lin eager to understand the Indian market, and Jain eager to learn about the company’s culture and future plans.
Later that year, Jain visited Xiaomi’s head office, and met Bin Lin and Barra. Barra said he was drawn to Jain’s “tremendous consumer and e-commerce experience, and that was far more valuable to us than regular telecom experience, because ultimately, we are an e-commerce company.” After several months of discussion, Jain joined the company in May 2014, just ahead of its launch in India in July.
Today, Xiaomi’s team in India comprises 19 people, who work out of a set of rooms on one floor of an office building in Bengaluru. The team handles everything from supply and after-sales service to research and development and customising content for local languages. Jain, a soft-spoken man with a shaved head and an easy smile, sits in a kind of alcove within one of these rooms, just big enough to fit his desk and a few cartons of Xiaomi merchandise. When I interviewed him in the office, in December, he would occasionally call out to colleagues in the room for any information he was unsure of, to answer my questions.
“We always thought we would be a very small team,” he told me. “It’s very easy to hire a hundred people immediately. But the problem with that mentality is that you lose focus. With a smaller team you can move much faster and focus better and make decisions quicker.”
After the troubles of the first sale, Jain sat in one of Flipkart’s offices in Koramangala, in south-east Bengaluru, for the second sale, to try and help ensure that the process would be free of hiccups. When the sale began, he clicked on the “Buy Now” button, but reached an “Out of Stock” message, he recalled. At first he assumed that there were technical problems with the site, as there had been during the first sale. He tried again a second time, and, when he was greeted with the same message, realised that the stock had actually sold out, within seconds. “That was the first time,” he told me, “we said ‘Wow, we hadn’t expected anything like this.’”
Xiaomi’s decision to import 10,000 phones to sell for each of its first two sales was based on an analysis of Google search trends and the brand’s own social media following in the country, Jain said. They hadn’t “been extremely accurate in forecasting demand here,” he added, but are making an effort to scale up globally to meet demand. “Our production capacity has grown nine times in two years,” he pointed out, and said achieving such expansion had been “a humongous task.”
At times, Xiaomi’s ambitions of selling more have been scaled down owing to simple logistical issues. For instance, Jain pointed out that during Flipkart’s Big Billion Day sale, in October, Xiaomi could have offered 200,000 phones to buyers. But because its manufacturer was short of chargers that were compatible with Indian sockets, it was forced to limit sales to 175,000 units, Jain said.
Today, according to Jain, Xiaomi sells between 50,000 and 100,000 phones in India every week. While much of this is through flash sales, it also has some products, such as the Redmi Note 4G, that are now available for regular sale through Flipkart, with no pre-registration. The company initially shipped its stock to India on numerous flights, but now relies on its own chartered aircraft.
Despite its successes in India, Xiaomi has a long way to go to catch up with market leaders, including Samsung and Micromax: market research by a Hong Kong firm, Counterpoint, found that for the third quarter of 2014, Samsung commanded a market share of 25 percent, and Micromax, 20 percent, while Xiaomi, “with just two months of sales” had won a market share of 1.5 percent.
Jain said Xiaomi wasn’t focusing on taking on the current market giants. “We don’t look at market shares or compete with any other brand,” he said. “We just want to focus on making a good product.” Barra, too, insisted the company wasn’t focusing on garnering market share. “It’s about building an engaged user base,” he said. “We are an internet company much more than a smartphone vendor. To us, a smartphone is a vehicle to provide services.”
[ III ]
XIAOMI’S RISE TO PROMINENCE in India has been propelled by the overall growth of the smartphone market, itself contained within the rapid expansion of the country’s cell phone market. This growth has its origins in 1991, when liberal economic reforms were set in motion under the then prime minister PV Narasimha Rao. The telecommunications sector saw its first set of reforms with the National Telecom Policy of 1994, the first document of its kind, which spelt out a goal of increasing the reach of telecommunications with the participation of both public and private companies.
Tracing the history of the sector in his 2008 book India: The Emerging Giant, the economist Arvind Panagariya notes that in the initial years after the first NTP, private players struggled to gain a foothold owing to the actions of the Department of Telecom, which regulated the sector and set prohibitive costs for private companies. Even after the creation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or TRAI, an independent regulator tasked with overseeing the growth of the sector, in 1997, the department retained its power over policy. The scenario changed after the second Vajpayee government issued the New Telecom Policy, in 1999, which recognised that “the result of the privatisation has so far not been entirely satisfactory.” The new policy strengthened the role of TRAI, and specifically articulated the government’s intention to support private investment, with license allocation norms, and measures such as allowing the sharing of infrastructure.
As service providers increased their reach across the country, handset manufacturers too saw their customer base expand. Multinational companies, such as Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, primarily catered to the higher end of the market, while many price-conscious users bought cheap Chinese phones that were imported into India. In more recent years, as consumers started moving to smartphones, Indian companies such as Micromax and Lava seized the chance to carve out a niche among more frugal customers.
These companies were helped by the growth, after 2011, of MediaTek, a Taiwanese microchip maker whose inexpensive products quickly grew popular among makers of low-cost phones, and helped them drive down prices. As an August 2013 article in The Economist pointed out, Media-Tek had earlier similarly disrupted other markets, such as those for CD players and television sets, before it ventured into the feature phone and smartphone space.
“MediaTek enabled manufacturers to reduce the time to market by providing them with a readymade reference design platform and firmware,” Agrawal, the technology editor, said. “All that manufacturers had to do was finalise the industrial design of the smartphone and pick additional hardware features, such as camera resolution, battery capacity, and so on. This also reduced the R&D costs involved in developing a product.”
While the higher-end smartphone brands in India primarily relied on chips from the American manufacturer Qualcomm, Indian companies were quick to collaborate with Chinese manufacturers who were making significantly cheaper smartphones using MediaTek technology. Karan Thakkar, a senior market analyst with IDC, pointed out that this low-cost strategy worked because the vast majority of Indian consumers were not choosy about their technology. “Although now every consumer may talk about chipset-level details, earlier, when Indian vendors had just launched, consumers only looked at basic things, like a camera and megapixels, while choosing a phone,” he said.
The basic business model these Indian companies followed involved stamping Chinese-made phones with their brands, and then importing them for sale, supported by a blitz of publicity. Micromax, for instance, has endorsement deals with the likes of the actors Akshay Kumar and Hugh Jackman. Most Chinese manufacturers also allowed importers to mix and match components, and thus create a range of models to appeal to a variety of consumers—particularly useful in a heterogeneous market like India.
Global companies, on the other hand, generally had much more rigid research and development processes, making them slow to adapt. Agrawal recounted being at a press conference in the late 2000s, and asking the CEO of Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, about the company’s plans for dual-SIM phones. “He said, ‘Our carriers don’t like dual-SIM products, because they don’t want their revenues to be cannibalised,’” Agrawal told me. “I pointed out that India was an open market for handset and service providers. He said, ‘We are looking at global markets, not individual markets.’”
“The writing on the wall was clear,” Agrawal added. “They were going to miss out on the fastest growing telecom market in the world.”
For the Indian companies, the rewards of tying up with Chinese manufacturers were quickly apparent. In 2012, Micromax broke into the ranks of the top five smartphone sellers in India. By the first quarter of 2013, Micromax and Karbonn were the second- and third-highest selling smartphone brands in India, behind the market leader, Samsung. IDC announced that in the second quarter of 2014, with Lava joining the list, Indian companies accounted for three of the top five smartphone sellers in the country. This February, Canalys, a Singapore-based research firm, reported that Micromax had dethroned Samsung as the highest selling smartphone brand in India—a claim that Samsung has disputed. Nevertheless, IDC data also indicate that Samsung should be concerned about Indian competitors eroding its market share, which was down from 33 percent in the quarter ending in September 2013 to 24 percent a year later.
Xiaomi has positioned itself to appeal to users of high-end phones while offering them significantly lower prices than the competition. “Some international device vendors have a brand pull, but since most people refresh their phones every one-and-a-half to two years, the value-for-money segment is increasing,” Thakkar said.
The company’s pricing has always been at odds with standard industry strategy. “Typically, all consumer-electronics products have the maximum margins when they are launched,” Agrawal said. “Companies usually take advantage of it being the latest and greatest product the world has ever seen, and pile on their margins as well as marketing and other overheads while pricing a new product.” Xiaomi follows the reverse strategy, offering new products with very low margins, and focusing on increasing revenues as the product stays in the market.
“The key for its pricing strategy to work is that the product has a long shelf life and its price doesn’t erode over time,” Agrawal said. “In order to make that happen, Xiaomi ensures its products have a shelf life of at least 18 months.” He pointed out that the company also plans its inventory accordingly: “It ensures that the inventory is limited initially when it has lower margins, and increases it when the numbers are favourable and component costs go down.”
BUT WHILE XIAOMI IS BENEFITTING from aggressive pricing and smart marketing in India, it is also facing conflicts over intellectual property in the use of certain technologies in its products. This is part of a larger trend of legal battles between technology companies around the world, involving major players such as Apple, Samsung, HTC and Nokia.
“Intellectual property serves two purposes,” Vishal Tripathi, the principal analyst at the United States-based research firm Gartner, told me. “Offensive value, which is about innovation; and defensive value, which acts as barrier to entry to the competition. And hence patents are valued at billions.” Rushabh Doshi, an analyst at the research firm Canalys, told me that “Due to their recent arrival into the mobile market, and also due to minimal investment into R&D, new entrants in India could fall victim to IP infringement of older companies like Nokia or Ericsson.”
In December last year, the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson filed a lawsuit against Xiaomi in Delhi, alleging that the Chinese firm was infringing on its patents in certain technologies used in its phones. On 8 December, after examining the complaint, the Delhi High Court ordered Xiaomi to stop sales in the country until 5 February, when the next hearing was scheduled.
In an email, a spokesperson for Ericsson told me that, “For more than three years, Ericsson has made numerous attempts to discuss a license agreement on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms for products compliant with the GSM, EDGE, and UMTS/WCDMA standards with Xiaomi,” referring to multiple second-generation and third-generation mobile technologies. “However, Xiaomi has refused to respond to Ericsson’s numerous invitations to discuss a patent license agreement.” But according to Jain, Xiaomi is “open to amicable talks with any company. We’ll present to the court our point of view and what we think is the right picture.” Jain declined to comment further on the lawsuit, saying the matter was sub judice.
After Xiaomi appealed the 8 December order, a division bench granted it permission to import and sell phones that had Qualcomm processors, but not those that had chips from MediaTek. (The court has also directed Xiaomi to deposit Rs 100 with it for every phone that it sells in India, until the case is settled.)
At the 5 February hearing, Ericsson accused Xiaomi of violating the court’s order and continuing to sell MediaTek-powered phones, through a website called Xiaomishop.com. Xiaomi denied having any affiliation with the site, which has since been taken down. The judge extended Xiaomi’s permission to sell Qualcomm devices until 18 March, when the case comes up for hearing again.
Agrawal believes that negotiating the patent regime will present a challenge to Xiaomi, “especially when it attempts to grow outside of China.” But its rapid global success could also give it an advantage in this regard. “With its current valuation of about $45 billion, and a looming IPO in the next couple of years, which could theoretically value the company at $100 billion, Xiaomi could also look at buying patents to protect itself,” he said.
The legal dust-up should serve as a note of caution to smartphone companies trying to take advantage of the growing Indian market, according to Doshi, the Canalys analyst. “It should give all smartphone companies in India, whether local or international, a wake-up call to ramp up their own patent portfolios, which can be used as bargaining chips in such injunctions.”
[ IV ]
WHEN I MET HIM IN NOVEMBER, Barra told me that Xiaomi wanted “to build an Indian business and an Indian company. Manufacturing is in that spectrum and something we’d like to do.” He didn’t commit to a timeline for this, but said that he expects the process to start within a couple of years. Xiaomi joins a string of companies that have indicated an interest in producing smartphones in India. Some have already taken steps in this direction. Micromax, which was already making tablets in a facility in Rudraprayag, Uttarakhand, announced in April last year that it had also started making smartphones there. In October, the Economic Times reported that Lava was planning “to spend R500 crore in local operations over three years, after which it will shift most or all of its production from China to India,” and quoted the company’s chairman and managing director, Hari Om Rai, who said that it was planning to “‘finalise six places in three states’ to accommodate the entire ecosystem around handset manufacturing.”
Some of these plans dovetail neatly with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” campaign, through which the government aims to attract investment in manufacturing centres in India. It appeared plausible that, in the natural course of events, we would soon see smartphones entirely manufactured in India, helped along by friendly government policies.
But some industry leaders have also expressed uncertainty over setting up manufacturing here. Barra told me, “It’s not just about finding a factory in India. It’s about having an ecosystem in place so we can source locally.” Sudhir Hasija, the chairman of Karbonn, echoed this concern when I met him. “The most unfortunate part is that the supply chain is not in India,” he said. “There are minimum 127 to 147 components in a phone. If one screw is missing, my entire production line is stopped.” He added that the immediate disadvantages of setting up a manufacturing base in India could be considerable. “My costs will go up, balance sheet dynamics will go up,” he said.
There was a concomitant, more fundamental, question that most news reports forgot to examine, concerning the difference between manufacturing and assembling. Most smartphone facilities currently in operation in India are assembly centres, where workers put together components that have been fabricated outside the country. The capacity of Indian plants to manufacture smartphone components from raw material remains limited. If India is to transform into a global investment destination, like China, it will need to develop an ability in primary manufacturing, where industrial materials are created from raw materials. India has nurtured a capacity of this kind in some areas, such as the automobile sector, but in the cell phone sector, its track record has been less encouraging.
The story of Nokia’s plant in Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, might serve as a caution. The plant, the largest in India and one of the company’s largest in the world, was an integrated complex, which also housed the facilities for the production of some components—such as chargers and cases—used with Nokia’s phones. As Business Today reported in August last year, a number of states had competed for Nokia’s business when, in 2004, it announced its interest in setting up a plant in India. Tamil Nadu’s winning bid created thousands of jobs and was seen as a triumph for the state and for its capital.
But, nearly a decade later, the plant ran into difficulties. The Business Today story described a number of factors that led to trouble, including poor working conditions, accidents, and interference from political parties. Then, in the first half of 2014, both the Tamil Nadu and the central governments served Nokia tax notices claiming several thousands of crores of rupees. The ensuing dispute hobbled the plant’s finances, and prevented Nokia from selling it to Microsoft when the latter bought over Nokia’s handset business.
Confusion prevailed, and the implications for other handset manufacturers with a presence or an interest in India were far from clear. A delegation from some of these companies met the telecom minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, in June last year, seeking a quick resolution to the dispute. But the matter remained unresolved, and, with production stalled, thousands of the Nokia plant’s workers, who had begun to enjoy some economic security, were plunged into uncertainty. In October, Nokia announced that it was shutting the plant. This has had a spill-over effect: last month, Foxconn, a Taiwanese multinational that also had a manufacturing plant in Sriperumbudur, whose biggest customer was the Nokia plant, announced that it, too, was closing its facility, leading to a further loss of jobs.
A spate of unconfirmed reports subsequently appeared about possible buyers for the Nokia plant. Among these was a Times of India story speculating that Xiaomi was interested. But Manu Jain had assured the paper’s reporter that the company “had not looked into it.” When I asked him about it, Jain told me that the first he had heard of Xiaomi’s interest in the plant was through the same news report.
The Nokia plant’s fate was widely seen as a sign of how vulnerable manufacturers and plants in India are to regulatory and political instability. It was also a demonstration of how many varied factors have to work in synchrony if a manufacturing centre is to be sustained; it would require coordination on a far greater scale if the economic transformation suggested by Make in India is to succeed.
As with companies in most other sectors, smartphone brands, too, are watching to see what incentives the government will propose under the Make in India initiative. Favourable policies may lead many who have currently expressed interest in setting up facilities in India, such as Karbonn and Xiaomi, to do so. But the prospect of a smartphone that is entirely, or even significantly, manufactured in India, remains a distant one. In the immediate future, we may see an increase in the number of smartphones sold in the Indian market that are also assembled in India, but most will continue to be “Made in China.”