Neil Shah is an Industry Analyst & Consultant covering the technology industry. He currently tracks, measures, and analyses the key performance, business, and financial metrics of the players in the technology industry. His strong understanding and knowledge of business, consumer, and technology trends allows him to deliver quality insights, analysis, and forecasts for the rapidly growing technology industry.
Neil brings in more than fourteen years of rich multifunctional experience covering a wide spectrum of technical and management functions from consumer electronics, high technology, education to telecommunications. He has handled diverse roles from customer service operations, planning, and procurement, supply chain management, business analysis, market research to product management.
How did you get to become an expert in your key topics?
I grew up tinkering with electronics and went on to become an Electronics Engineer and fortunately landing my first job at one of the most innovative companies, the Dutch, Philips Electronics.
The multi-faceted role of technical trainer, service operations, product management, supply chain to procurement at Philips helped me follow my passion and have an all-around technical and business learning in cutting edge consumer electronics from Plasma TVs to Hi-Fi Audio to GSM mobile phones then.
The GSM mobile phones piqued my interest to pursue post-graduation in the very futuristic field of wireless and telecom networks in the mid-2000s and around the time Apple was working on the iconic iPhone. While pursuing my Masters of Science in Telecommunications and Business, a cross-disciplinary program at the prestigious James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, I built upon skill to blend technical and business analysis together.
I started blogging and tweeting in 2008-9 about telecom, wireless networks, handset OEMs, and more which actually helped me get into one of the reputed Industry Analysis firms then Strategy Analytics based out of the Boston area as a Research Analyst looking into the wireless devices ecosystem in the middle of the worst recession of the decade.
I spent great four years at SA learning and expanding my industry knowledge base, contacts, and reputation as a seasoned analyst. However, I decided to depart for India to be closer to my family and then bumped into my ex-SA colleague and ex-client to form Counterpoint Research and the rest is history.
Continuously interacting with different technology companies within the ecosystem, solving their pain points, answering their queries, providing strategic advice, and constantly learning from every interaction has allowed me to form a 360-degree perspective and various frameworks to connect the dots quickly.
What sub-topics are you most passionate about?
I am passionate about researching and analyzing at the intersection of technology and business. These include how technology and macro trends shape OEM businesses’, product and go-to-market strategies. Further, taking an ecosystem angle for various ICT technologies and different tech M&As gets me excited.
Who influences you within these topics?
Seasoned tech entrepreneurs, executives, VCs, marketers, book authors such as Satya Nadella, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jim Whitehurst, Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Kamran Etemad, and more.
What do you think the future holds in this space?
The future is the company that has the maximum share of a user’s lives – digital (share of data) or physical (share of belongings) or financial (share of wallet) will rule.
What brands are leading the way in this space?
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon are all going in this direction and have made products, services, and ecosystems one is thriving in every moment directly or indirectly. This stickiness and lock-in are what companies are looking for.
If a brand wanted to work with you, which activities would you be most interested in collaborating on?
What are your passions outside of work?
What would be the best way for a brand to contact you?
Email, DM on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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