Mumbai: Smartphone vendors, which were very aggressive on the E Commerce marketplaces one year before, now seems experiencing saturation in the crowded online space. Hence, almost all the major smartphone players have now turned toward the brick and mortal to grab the unexplored but highly potential business in the upcountry markets in India. Adding to the list, Chinese telecom equipment company, ZTE has revamped its distribution strategy to reach to every length and breadth of the country. The Chinese brand, which is primarily known for low budget smartphones, is hiring partners to tap the business in the upcountry market.
“Rural market is where we see the real growth coming from. It is a tough market to operate in and therefore remains largely untapped,” Sachin Batra, CMO of ZTE India told BusinessLine. (Click here to read)
“We are creating new partners and training them to ensure we have a large enough presence across the country. We would have 25,000 retail touch points with the help of this initiative in the next few months,” Batra said.
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ZTE has appointed five national distributors, each looking at a specific zone, to augment ZTE’s retail presence. These distributors are K Sons and Infintech who will look after ZTE’s North business, Nook India which is a 100% subsidiary of Redington will look after South, Ubiquity Distributors for West and Premier Distributors for East zone. ZTE has also established partnerships with BSNL, Reliance Communications, Tata, Vodafone, Spice Telecom and Aircel.
Batra said in India, the company will focus on the entry level market segment even though it does plan to launch its flagship devices just to highlight its engineering capabilities. “We will focus on smartphones priced between Rs 7,000-15,000, which is where the bulk of the demand lies,” he said.
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The company plans to mark its India launch with eight smartphones under the Blade series in mid-January. Six of these smartphones, mostly the entry level ones, will be sold only through the offline channel while the two higher end ones will sell through e-commerce platforms.
By mid-2017, ZTE will bring in its higher end phones as well as smart devices such as a smart home router, a smart watch and a smart projector, all of which would be mostly targeted at the urban buyers.
ZTE is also gearing up to launch its manufacturing facility in the country. According to Batra, the company is already in talks to start 2-3 contract manufacturing facilities in India and would be investing heavily in brand building through various marketing campaigns in the next few months.
Earlier, smartphone brands such as Blackberry, Coolpad, Asus, Zopo etc. have turned offline and have also announced to open retail outlets in the tier 3 and tier 4 markets.