Karbonn, country’s third largest smartphone vendor, is planning to expand its reach to new international markets by this month end.
Talking to The Pioneer, Company Managing Director Pradeep Jain said the company plans to expand its reach to new markets across Russia and African markets by August end.
“We are in all SAARC countries but this month we are looking at Russia and in September we will launch our products in African markets,” he said. “We are only waiting for approvals from Russian Government,” he added.
The company is not only focusing on increasing its footprint in other nations but has also plans to set up a manufacturing plant in the country by the end of this year.
“We are in discussion with three or four States for our manufacturing unit.”Even Jain mentioned earlier that we have land in Chennai but we will decide to set up manufacturing only after the elections,” Jain said.
Over the past a few months, the smartphone market has seen fierce competition, fuelled further by new entries like Gionee, Oppo and Xiaomi from China
In 2013, smartphone sales in the country grew almost three-fold to over 44 million, as per research firm IDC. In Q1 of 2014 alone, 17.59 million smartphones were shipped in India with sales being driven by affordable devices.
While Samsung is the category leader with a 35 per cent market share in Q1, local firms like Micromax (15 per cent), Karbonn (10 per cent) and lAVA (six per cent) also held significant share of the market. Nokia had 4 per cent share.
“ We will launch two windows based smartphone by the middle of this month, he informed when asked about the launch of windows phone. “We will launch eight to ten new handsets by the end of this fiscal,” he further added.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone is the second largest operating system in the Indian market, after Android. According to market research firm IDC, Windows Phone OS has just 5 per cent of the Indian market, while Android has around 80 per cent.
Karbonn earned Rs 4,900 crore revenue last fiscal year ended March 31 and expects Rs 8,000 crore this fiscal year. It is investing Rs 300 crore in R&D and marketing this year.
“Currently we have 15 per cent market share in smartphone and this year we are expecting to grow by 22 per cent on the back of new product launches,” said Jain while talking about market share.
The company, however, has decided not to bring 4G smartphones this year, due to underdeveloped ecosystem. It now plans to launch 4G smartphones in March 2015. Karbonn is also looking to tap the Indian wearables device market with smartwatches and smartbands, which it will launch in January 2015.