Tuesday, April 30, 2013

“We expect to build our market share step by step”

Victor Shan, President, Huawei Devices, India, speaks to Anirudh Raheja on how Huawei plans to build a sustainable position in the Indian mobile handsets space

B&E: How do you plan to consolidate your position in the handset market in India?
Victor Shan (VS): Globally, we are no. 2 amongst telecom equipment manufacturers and also hold the number 6 position in the list of biggest handset manufacturers in the world. For now, we don’t manufacture handsets in India as it does not make sense to support the weak share that we have over here, but the telecom sector here has been growing at a phenomenal pace. Riding on the same, we expect to reach among the top mobile phone manufacturers in India. Primarily, our focus will be to gradually increase our share through metro cities with the wide range of smartphones that we have lately turned up with, and then we would change our branding and positioning according to tier 2 & tier 3 consumers at a later stage. We sold nearly 1 lakh smartphone devices in FY11-12, and expect to sell up to 3.5 million handsets (including feature phones) in India in 2012-13.

B&E: Talking about your commitment to the Indian market, what has been your strategy for building brand Huawei in India?
VS: Initially we did launch our handsets in India by bundling with service providers, which can be termed as co-branding, since the same has been successful for Huawei across different markets. But realizing the needs of the Indian customer, we then launched our handset range directly into the open market, pre-loaded with social media features like Facebook and Twitter for the style and feature conscious youth, and to stay competitive with other handset players in the market. Adding to that, we also launched the world’s 1st cloud-based phones in India in November last year, since India has always been a market with tremendous potential and we are pretty aggressive on increasing our product range here for a better reach over the next 3 years.

B&E: In the Indian context, can you name some major challenges that you expect to witness moving forward in 2012?
VS: India is a market where localisation plays a very important role. People here prefer local applications, and handsets customised to regional languages in your product range. So the major part of our branding depends upon the region we are focusing on. We have been focusing heavily on promoting our handsets across organised retail chains in India, but we are also pushing our private channels for an increased sales numbers. We have grown by 30% in FY ‘11, and expect to build our market share step by step.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
 
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