Homegrown mobile maker, Karbonn mobiles aims to achieve Rs 8000 crore in the next financial year, as the company has aggressive plans for its smartphone segments.
“ Till date we have achieved Rs 4600 crore revenue, we are still expecting to achieve more Rs 200 crore in next ten days and for the next financial year we are looking at Rs 8000 crore, Karbonn Mobile Managing Director Pardeep Jain told The Pioneer.“About 60 per cent of our handsets sold are feature phones and the remaining are smart-phones. We expect the ratio to change to 50-50 in the next fiscal,” he said.
Company also plans to spend Rs 300 crore on marketing and Rs 400 crore on R& D in next fiscal.Jain informed that they will launch smartphones in Russian and African market this month, when asked about to capture international market.The company on Wednesday launched three new smart-phones, based on the latest Android KitKat operating system and hexa and octa-core processors, in partnership with mobile chipmaker MediaTek.
“We have land in Chennai but we will decide to set up manufacturing only after the elections,” Pradeep said when asked about the manufacturing plant.We are the first Indian brand to offer KitKat OS to the Indian consumers. The smart-phone market in India grew by nearly 229 per cent in 2013 and the partnership with MediaTek will allow us to further consolidate our position in the domestic market,” he said.
According to research firm IDC, smart-phone sales surpassed 44 million units in 2013, up from 16.2 million in 2012.This surge has been mainly powered by home grown vendors which have shown a tremendous and consistent growth over the past four quarters of 2013. Samsung led the Indian smart-phone market (37 per cent), followed by Micromax (16 per cent), Karbonn (10 per cent) and Sony (5 per cent) in the October-December 2013 period.
The overall phone market in India stood at close to 257 million units in 2013, an 18 per cent increase from 218 million units in 2012, with a remarkable migration from feature phones to smart-phones primarily due to the narrowing price gaps between the two product categories.