New Delhi, March 11: Nokia has taken years to embrace the android platform and is expecting the Nokia X to revive its dwindling fortunes in the mobile market. On the other hand, the new offering by the company hasn’t excited the channel partners, but they are upbeat about Nokia’s strategy to tap into the sub Rs. 10,000 phone segment.
The company launched the Nokia X smartphones in India on Monday, based on Android’s open-source software, and with a price tag of Rs 8599 it is in direct competition with Samsung, Sony and Indian phonemakers such as Lava, Karbonn and Micromax.
Although the excitement is building up amongst consumers, the dealers are waiting to get first lot of Nokia X phones. Partners in Delhi and Mumbai are expecting to get the first stock of smartphones on Tuesday, while in Bangalore, Magna Info Solution have sold three units of Nokia X on the day of launch.
Before the official launch, Nokia has trained all its Asha and Lumia selling retailers on Nokia X. According to P Balaji, MD, Nokia phones said, “As we have lots of customer care and promoters in different stores, as a part of the launch we have trained them, made them qualified and competent to handle any customer related query of X family.”
This was confirmed by Mumbai based Mukesh Hiren of Solutions World, “Our entire front end staff of the store have undergone rigorous training on Nokia X. But, we are waiting to get demo phones as many customers are visiting our store to catch the first glimpse of the phone. They want to see how the android interface will work. Even, the competitors are diverting customers by saying that Android Apps will be working as third party apps. So, many Android users have a lot of queries about the interface.”
“The Nokia X may cannibalise the market of Asha smartphones or low end Lumia phones. The excitement for Nokia Android phones is certainly there in the market as the phone offers best of both the software and hardware. But it will be interesting to see, how customers accept the phones in coming days. We are all geared up for marketing plans, we are sending SMS and EDMs to our existing customers about the new phone and building the excitement. Already, Nokia has delivered all the marketing related material to the store,” opined Hiren.
Most of the partners feel, Nokia X + and XL will be the game changer as these phones are much superior in configuration and pricing.
For Magna Info Solution, response has been good as the dealer has sold three boxes of Nokia X to Samsung users. “Nokia X will certainly impact the low end Samsung smartphones and create a new market in sub 10,000 phones, in which Nokia was missing. So far we have got roughly 20 pieces of Nokia X, of which we sold three phones on the launch day,” said Amulya Prasad.
Meanwhile, Nokia will continue to drive existing distribution model for Lumia, Asha and now X family. Sari Harju, head of mobile phones for India and South Asia at Nokia India said, “Nokia X is an opportunity for Android users and Nokia features phones. Within a week thousands of apps will be ported on Nokia stores, backend operator billing for customers and developer program for third party software developers will drive the whole ecosystem. We would be aggressively pushing the phones to urban and rural part through our robust distribution model in next two months.”