We aim to be among top 3 mobile brands in India by FY'17: Karbonn Mobiles MD

By Manishika Miglani

Buoyed by its investment plans of Rs 800 crore in manufacturing of mobile phones over the next three years, home grown handset maker Karbonn is targeting to be among the top three mobile phone brands in India by next fiscal.

Its manufacturing units, located in Uttar Pradesh and Telangana, are expected to start production within the next two quarters and will help in covering 60-70 percent of its domestic market requirements.

In an interaction with Voice&Data, Pardeep Jain, MD, Karbonn Mobiles, talks about the company’s manufacturing plans and its international forays.

Voice&Data: Brief us about your number of manufacturing centres and your expansion plans.

Pardeep Jain: India is the fastest growing mobile market in the world. We have also launched our handsets in various important countries of South Asia to increase the sales in addressable markets.

In the near future, we are also planning to launch ourselves in Middle East and African markets.

In order to tap these markets, we shall focus on developing a customized product range as per the countries’ local requirements, complying with local regulatory authorities’ norms, robust distribution channel and after sales services and localized marketing strategies. For this financial year, we are also focusing on creating a demand-driven market by launching about 3-4 models every quarter.

Be it Asian, Middle Eastern or African markets, we seek to bring the best of technologies to the consumers at a price sensitive bracket, which offers them the freedom to enjoy the best of the mobility world at the best possible price constituent.

Voice&Data: What kind of policies you expect from the government to boost the manufacturing eco-system in India?

Pardeep Jain: The Indian mobile industry is going through a phase of transformation and government cooperation is a must to sustain the phenomenal growth of this sector.

A cut in the taxes on mobile phone brands of Indian origin will help the Indian phone makers to compete well with our international competitors. We shall also seek from the government rebates in state rates for importing raw and finished goods from off-shore clients based on which we will be able to pass on more value-for-money product range to the consumer.

As an impetus to the Indian mobile makers, the government must pitch in for rebates to set up indigenous plants which will help the Indian mobile manufacturers in bringing out more value for money products to empower the telecom boom in the country.

The government must introduce policies, including tax holidays and interest subsidies to give a push to domestic handset manufacturing and increase the mobile phone user base in India.

To establish India as global power in international mobile market, the government needs to provide easy financing options for mobility goods like mobile devices and tablets.

The indigenous products will help in realizing goals like ‘Digital India’ and ‘Make in India’ and take the mobile and internet revolution to mass consumers.

The strong willingness and campaigns around such initiatives will help in developing a digital environment in the country. Additionally, there is an urgent need for establishment of a robust mobile design eco-system to enable and promote manufacturing and exports.

With locally manufactured products, we expect to see billion hands using mobile phones for communicating and sharing data in coming years.

Voice&Data: Do you think that the recent move to increase the service tax and import duty on mobiles will pave way for a stronger “Make in India” initiative? Please elaborate.

Pardeep Jain: With the expectations set post the announcement of Budget 2015, which is to encourage the local mobile manufacturers, India is going to achieve a 25% share in global mobile phone manufacturing market by 2019.

The mobile segment in India is anticipated to have an immense potential of absorbing manpower, thus it can always be looked as a one of great platforms to create millions of jobs in the country.

The demand of mobile devices is increasing and domestic manufacturing has not been able to match up to the ever-changing needs of Indian mobile market.

The need of the hour is to boost manufacturing to save money by reducing imports and increase the export of home-grown products.

In addition to that, the strong willingness and campaigns around the ‘Digital India’ initiative will help in developing a digital environment in the country and create an eco-system of digital literacy and Indian Information Superhighway.

By introducing the favorable policies along with locally manufactured products, we expect to see billion hands using mobile phones for communicating and sharing data in coming years.

Moreover, the indigenous handsets will strengthen the ‘Digital India’ vision, as mobile players would be able to cater to the masses in large volumes.

Voice&Data: What is your go-to-market strategy for being competitive in comparison to the International mobile brands?

Pardeep Jain: The Indian mobile phone market while being really competitive does give out space for the individual players to play as well. The major driving forces for the growth of the Indian mobile brands have been value for money offerings coupled with localized content which have helped the brands in establishing themselves in this volatile market.

By offering state-of-the-art technical marvels at an affordable range, the Indian phone manufacturers have been able to create a space for themselves in the market and have provided cost effective options for the consumers, which act as the major growth drivers in the Indian mobile market.

In today’s times, the consumers are very intelligent and only deviate from their brand loyalties if they are offered something best at lower prices. It is thus at Karbonn, we are working constantly through various associations, tie-ups and investing in R&D to tap the consumers and create a pertinent brand connect with the audience.

India’s mobile handset market is quite cluttered with international brands having a strong hold on the consumers.

Our strategy worked and we were able to create faith of the people in Karbonn Mobiles. In order to sustain that faith we provided them, we have developed a dedicated team for after sales services with low turnaround time for their queries. We are adopting the same policy in metro cities as well and receiving a great response. For creating domain expertise, Karbonn Mobiles, besides the ground level approach, has also invested heavily in research and development to churn out innovative and unique features in sync with market trends along with investing in various associations, consumer promotions, etc.

We are targeting to change the face of the Indian mobile phone market with our quality handsets and intend to be amongst the top 3 mobile phone brands by next fiscal.

Intending to deliver an innovative smartphone experience, Karbonn endeavours to bring feature-rich mobile devices at disruptive price-points to the consumers. Karbonn’s “value-for-money” devices have created a niche in the Indian smartphone market, which has given the brand a head start amongst competition.

Our brand’s USP include value-for-money proposition, customer-centric initiatives, widespread distribution strategies, excellent after -sales services with our network of over 900 service centres and over 85,000 retailers across India.

While the flagship technology is blurring the lines between mobile players, a brand has to be always ahead in technology to capture a larger market share. We are a domestic brand that brings most advanced technology at affordable cost, thus making affordable technology reality for our consumers. This has been our foremost business USP that gives us a competitive advantage over the other domestic & international brands.

Voice&Data: The domestic handset players are mainly preferred for their budget series of smartphones. Do you foresee any major transition to the premium segment in terms of consumer behaviour?

Pardeep Jain: India has the fastest growing population of Internet users. It has emerged as the third largest country after China with 620 million of population. The primary drivers of this exponential growth include: affordable low-cost data handsets and penetration of smartphones to small towns with a perpetual need of internet.

Today, 70% of the rural population access internet on their mobile phones and stay abreast about the outside world.

It’s been anticipated that smartphones sales will cross 17 billion dollar as devices continue to get smarter and customized. Thus, the next smartphone growth phase would be driven by the value conscious consumer leading to a surge in demand for feature-packed devices available at disruptive price-points.

Voice&Data: How do you plan to consolidate the “Digital India” move?

Pardeep Jain: ‘Digital’ is definitely the fastest growing advertising and marketing medium for the corporates. With 213 million mobile internet users in India and 120 million smartphone users separately, digital and mobile advertising is the new hype for the marketers to enhance brand visibility and appeal.

There is certainly a possibility that digital will emerge as one of the primary or even the sole medium of advertising and marketing for the upcoming and existing brands in the future. However, the Indian smartphone user demographic is highly fragmented with advanced users forming only a small chunk of the overall market. An increased smartphone penetration in India, the ‘language problem’ has emerged as one of the key hurdles in the mobile ecosystem which is pushing back users from adopting mobile phones across cities.

Thus, it is imperative to offer advanced smartphone solutions while being simple enough to be adopted intuitively by the user.

Also given the linguistic diversity of our country, we have introduced a range of devices supporting up to 21 Indian languages to encourage adoption.