Chinese phone maker Lephone eyes to be in top 10 list in India by 2018

By Krishna Mukherjee

If new entrant Chinese player Comio is targeting to sell about one million units of its branded smartphones by March 2018, there’s one more player which is slowly and steadily is making a mark for itself.

Lephone, which is also from China, is cashing in on affordable pricing, unique features and robust distribution network to make it to the top 10 list of the Indian mobile handset market by next year.

According to CyberMedia Research, the company stands at 24th position in the Indian mobile handset market currently. It has shipped 0.60 million units in the first half of this year, holding a market share of 0.51%.

Since it started operations in the country in 2014, it was aggressively working on to strengthen its distribution network and today it has 400 distributors pan-India.

It is targeting to sell 35 lakh devices by the end of 2017 and has presence in almost all states, except in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Chattisgarh.

“Supply chain is very crucial in any business. We believe it is your robust distribution network that matters a lot and if your product is unique your customer would come back to you again and again,” says Vinod Pandit, Business Head-India, Lephone Technology Pvt Ltd.

“On the back of robust distribution, affordable devices, after sales services, we would be in the top ten list of mobile handset makers in India by next year. However, we aim big and our target is to be on the top five list,” he adds.

The company has plans to launch a range of smartphones before Diwali in the price band of INR 3K-5K.

Last month, the company launched its budget W2 smartphone with 4G VoLTE support in India at Rs 3,999. The dual-SIM Lephone W2 runs the company’s 360 OS based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The smartphone sports a 4.5-inch FWVGA (480×854 pixels) display and is powered by an unspecified quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz coupled with 1GB of RAM. In terms of optics, the W2 comes with a 2-megapixel rear camera and a VGA camera at the front.

The smartphone from Lephone comes with 8GB of built-in storage, which is expandable via microSD card (up to 32GB). The connectivity options offered by W2 include 4G VoLTE, Bluetooth, USB, Wi-Fi, GPS/ A-GPS, and FM radio.

Currently, its manufacturing partners are MCM and Wistron for India market.