We would be launching products for the entire gamut of population

Motorola has been consistently losing market share in the handset segment.
What will be your strategy to gain market share?

We would be launching new products in a couple of months. You would see us
launching products for the entire gamut of the population. The primary focus is
to address the needs of consumers from various sections of the population.

As of now we are not planning to change our distribution network. We have a
pretty strong distribution network in the country. We have over 200 town
distributors and we also have a national distributor. Currently, we are
available in 20,000 retain outlets. We would continue to have a very strong and
robust distribution network in the country.

Faisal Siddiqui

We also have a lot of tie-ups in modern trade. Overall, I believe we have
succeeded in taking the phone to the consumer. At one end we are present in all
the major modern retail outlets and at the other end, our presence is quite
strong in the rural segment.

Motorola was focusing only on mid and hi-end handset. Is there going to be
any change in the strategy?

We would be focusing on all the consumer segments. We are planning to launch
three new phones in the first quarter of the coming year. We would be launching
Motorokr EM35, Moto VE66 and Motosurf A3000 in the first quarter of the coming
year. While VE66 is based on imaging and EM 35 on music and A3000 is for the
enterprise segment. All the handsets would be having Crystal Talk 2.0 feature,
that was launched last year, and adds to the voice quality. We are still working
on the pricing of these new handsets.

What do you think are the trends for the coming year?

Basically, for the year 2009, we believe that mobitainment is going to be
the need of the customers, where he is going to look for services beyond the
plain vanilla VAS and SMS services. The consumer is going to look for services
around imaging and mobitainment. The end consumer is also going to look for
higher storage ... enough storage to keep the information. Ease-of-use is going to
be an important criteria. Apart from that, GPS is also likely to emerge as a
trend in the hi-end phones.

Touchscreen segment is also evolving. A certain market segments desires
touchscreen and we see that as a major trend for the coming year. We were the
first ones to launch touchscreen and ROKR. We have consistently launched
touchscreen and we would continue to do so.

Gagandeep Kaur

gagandeepk@cybermedia.co.in