Interviews

‘In Smartphones We Want To Have More Exclusive Partnerships’

flipkart
Michael Adnani
VP – Retail and Head – Brand Alliances, Flipkart

It has been a partnership that has completely disrupted the mobile and the e-commerce market. Flipkart’s deal with Motorola has become a stuff of legend and the combination has managed to sell more than 1.6 million devices in one year.

Now with the festival season ahead, the Indian online market place is bracing itself for the festival season along with the launch of the second generation Moto G. Speaking to the Channeltimes, Michael Adnani, VP – Retail and Head – Brand Alliances, Flipkart talks about the Moto partnership success and how they are braced for the Diwali rush.

Excerpts

CT: With the launch of second generation of Moto G, will the older version be phased out?

Adnani: Before the launch of the new phone, we had dropped the price of Moto G by Rs. 2000 for those who could not afford it during the first launch. We will continue to sell the first version of Moto G for another one month, till the stock last. Having said so we have enough stocks for Moto G2. To push the sale starting from Midnight we are giving six direct and indirect offers for one day to create the excitement on our platforms.

CT: What is the shelf life of phones on Flipkart?

Adnani: The shelf life has been coming down, it is ideally between 6-12 months depends on the age group and location. One of the major shift we are seeing with the affordable range of smartphones, the feature phones users are rapidly shifting to sub 6,000 smartphones. Our partnership with Karbonn is creating this pull. Today, many users are looking for 4G phones.

CT: What has been the secret of Motorola- Flipkart partnership?

Adnani: There is big difference between partnership and relationship, today, we have few partnership and many relationship. There is a commitment to sell their products. We are a data rich company, our intelligence data tell us what will work or not around the product. Our partnership with Moto phones is very close and tight. We work mutually be its any campaign, pricing and product innovations. The Flipkart and Motorola partnership is stronger than ever on the back of the phenomenal success we have seen in the past few months. We have given consumers and industry many firsts with the excusive partnership. The Moto G, MotoE and Moto X are amongst the bestselling mobile phones with record sellouts and we are thrilled about the new Motorola devices going live exclusively on Flipkart.

Although we are not involved in after sales service, we have been pushing the company to strengthen their service capabilities. Our focus is to grow faster in rural areas and smaller markets, without service support, it is not possible to do business in these markets. We are looking to to expand our service capabilities to the next level.

CT: What is the average selling price of smartphones at Flipkart

Adnani: In last six months, the average selling price of smartphones has come down from Rs 10,000 to 6,000. For us the price band between 6,000-10,000 is a sweet spot.

CT: How important is smartphone category for Flipkart

Adnani: Its an extremely a big piece for any e-commerce company. Our three top selling brands are Motorola , Xiaomi and other brands like Asus Zenphone. In smartphones, we want to have more exclusive partnership pact.

CT: How would you ensure there is no further outage of your site during festivity time. What are your plans for Diwali time?

Adnani: We are all geared up, our resources in well in place to see the Diwali rush. We are witnessing the sale of 40,000 units of Xiaomi phones, with over 2,05,000 transactions happening in a quick way. Currently, we are selling 10,000 phones in a few seconds. With Diwali coming in, we want to have plethora of products available at different price band. There are two set of customers will be visiting to our site, who need to buy something at X price and there are people they don’t want to buy anything but just visiting our site. We want to target both the group.Our goal is to add new customers and engage with them for rest of the years.

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