Telecom Lead Asia: Lava International has outlined its smartphone strategy to gain market share in India.
One of the latest entrants to India’s phone market, Lava International focuses on 4 areas to strengthen its presence in the Indian mobile market which is currently dominated by players such as Samsung, Nokia, Sony, BlackBerry, LG, etc.
First, Lava International will focus on product development. It is spending heavily in research and development, and product development.
Second, the company will unveil new smartphones and feature phones in India this year. The company will also strengthen its presence in overseas markets.
Third, the company is planning to offer better customer experience in both the retail outlets and on the smartphones.
Fourth, Lava International is planning to spend heavily in marketing and promotions in the next couple of years. It is planning to spend around Rs 100 crore for promoting its products.
Lava Chairman and MD Hari Om Rai on Saturday said the company would invest more than Rs 100 crore on marketing and promotion to create awareness about its new phones and focus areas.
The Rs 100 crore investment is besides its ongoing investment in R&D and product development. “We are also open to invest in setting up a manufacturing facility in India. It may not happen this year. But setting up of own production unit is part of our target,” Rai added.
“We are looking for a strong eco-system including the availability of mobile phone components in India before investing in production facilities in the country.” Raid added.
At present, Lava International imports its smartphones. Last December, Lava clocked revenue of around Rs 1,000 crore. This is mainly from feature phones.
Lava International is targeting to achieve Rs 2,000 crore revenue from phone business this year. Out of this, Rs 1,000 crore revenue is expected to come from smartphone phones alone. This will be a big achievement for Lava since it needs to compete with major brands in India. But Lava International is confident about achieving this target. It will continue to work with Qualcomm and MediaTek for sourcing processors and plan for more smartphones for India.
The company is already a leader in feature phones in telecom markets such as Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir.
“We learnt from our feature phone marketing. We are readying to expand our presence in smartphones as well,” Rai said.
Lava International will train 3,000 professionals to offer better shop in shop experience to its customers. Lava’s feature phones and smartphones are available in 20,000 shops at presence, while it directly caters to 10,000 shops.
Rai says integrity will be Lava’s core value. “We are a long term player in India. We are one of the few phone companies in India with our own direct distribution network. We sell 100 percent of our phones to distributors on cash,” Rai added.
Lava is not looking at taking on Samsung and Nokia. But it will gain market share in its own markets. “We will be unveiling more phone products in the Rs 17,000 to Rs 18,000 range in coming months. We will be targeting 1.5 million phones to be sold during Diwali,” Rai added.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
