Meizu joins other Chinese smartphone brands on India bandwagon
Staff Reporter 2015-09-22 16:19
Smartphone accessories on sale in Fuzhou, Fujian province, Feb. 21. (File photo/CNS)
Chinese smartphone brand Meizu held a press briefing in New Delhi on Aug. 26, where it formally announced it is entering the Indian market. The company's senior marketing director Hua Hailiang cited rising sales for branded smartphones in the country, Caixin Weekly reports.
Hua visited Delhi's Karol Bagh area, the city's sales center for handsets, which is full of small-sized outlets offering smartphones from all over the world.
Smartphones have become popular in Karol Bagh over the past one to two years, but already the copycats are quickly fading away while branded smartphones are quickly expanding their market. "India's smartphone market is just like China's four to five years ago — full of chances and gold everywhere," said one unnamed executive at a Chinese smartphone maker.
According to market research firm Gartner, as of the end of 2014 India had about 610 million mobile phone users out of its total population of over 1.2 billion, but it has only 115 million smartphone users. Gartner analyst Anshul Gupta projected India's smartphone market will grow at a 40% annual compound rate over the next two years.
Over the past year, following the slowing sales of smartphones in the mainland China market, leading Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi, Meizu and Vivo are looking to India and they no longer rely on local partners but are pushing their own brands, said Kiranjeet Kaur, research director at market researcher IDC's Asia-Pacific region.
Almost all of China's major smartphone brands, including Huawei and Lenovo, have showed up in India.
Chinese handset makers are aware that they have to localize their operations in order to survive in India. Some of them, such as Xiaomi, are hiring locally for the management of their operations in the country, while others are still headed by Chinese executives, though they have sought to include local managers in their core team.
Chinese brands face strong competition in India, both from international giants such as Samsung, HTC and Sony, which have been in the market for years, and the local brands such as Micromax, Intex and Lava, which together control more than 10,000 retail shops across the nation.
Xiaomi has set up its Indian headquarters in Bangalore, where Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce platform, is headquartered, as well as many other counterparts. These e-commerce platforms are looking for products to expand their market share, and the collaboration may prove to be win-win for Xiaomi.
Xiaomi has chosen the 33-year-old Manu Jain as its chief executive for India, who has made Xiaomi the pioneer in expanding e-commerce channels. By April, Xiaomi had sold more than 1 million smartphones over the internet in India and became the country's No. 5 smartphone brand in terms of sales by May.
