HMD goes three-for-three on India; rivals still watching

While Samsung, Apple, and China’s big four sit on the fence, a Finnish underdog is quietly building the most India-aligned smartphone on the market — and it may be a smarter move than it looks.

HMD’s Vibe 2 is not just another mid-range 5G handset. In a single ₹10,999 device, the company has stacked three explicit bets on India’s emerging digital sovereignty agenda: Sanchar Saathi, Sarvam AI, and a D2M partnership with Tejas Networks. No other OEM has done all three. Most have done none.

The Sanchar Saathi gambit is cleverer than the headline suggests
DoT tried to mandate pre-installation of its cyber-safety app in December 2025. It failed — industry pushed back hard, and the directive was withdrawn. HMD watched that bruising standoff and saw an opening: be the first to offer it voluntarily, on the consumer’s terms, and take the credit without the coercion. “The choice is with the consumer,” says Ravi Kunwar, HMD India’s CEO. That is precisely the framing DoT could not enforce — and HMD is now delivering it for free, goodwill included.

The rivals — Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Realme, Samsung, Lava, Apple — have made no equivalent announcement. Their silence is not neutrality. In a market where government relationships increasingly determine distribution access, subsidy eligibility, and regulatory headroom, fence-sitting has a cost.

The AI layer is the sharper differentiation
Every other major OEM in India runs its AI features through Google, OpenAI, or Perplexity — American platforms, American servers, American data jurisdiction. HMD has bundled Sarvam AI, the sovereign AI platform that runs on India-based servers, supports 22 languages plus regional dialects, and keeps data within Indian borders. For a price-sensitive consumer segment that is also increasingly data-conscious, this is a genuinely distinct proposition. It is also the kind of partnership that lands well in government procurement conversations.

D2M is the long game
Direct-to-mobile broadcasting — pushing content directly to handsets via terrestrial TV spectrum, without internet — is still 6–12 months from meaningful rollout, by HMD’s own admission. But the Tejas Networks chipset trials are live. HMD is the only smartphone OEM publicly running device-level D2M pilots in India. If D2M gets government momentum as a rural content delivery mechanism, HMD has a structural head start that money cannot quickly replicate.

The strategic logic underneath all of this is simple
HMD is not going to out-spec Xiaomi at ₹11,000. It cannot out-market Samsung. What it can do is become the OEM that the Indian government points to when it needs a partner — on cybersecurity apps, on sovereign AI, on new spectrum technology. In a market where policy tailwinds matter as much as product specs, that is not a bad place to be.

The question the rest of the industry should be asking is not whether Sanchar Saathi is worth the boot-screen real estate. It is whether HMD just wrote the playbook for competing in India when you cannot win on scale.