ZTE plans to go big in India, to launch three more smartphones in October

Sachin Batra, CMO, ZTE India revealed to indianexpress.com what the go-ahead strategy for the company will be for the year ahead.

Chinese player ZTE is looking to expand its portfolio of smartphones as the next big next in India. The company, which currently has a line-up of seven phones, will pump up more money into marketing in the coming year and open exclusive stores as well. Sachin Batra, CMO, ZTE India revealed to indianexpress.com what the go-ahead strategy for the company will be for the year ahead.

“Going forward, by the end of this year, you’ll see our presence pan-India in terms of launch of products, and widening into offline space. We’ll going to offline very slowly. This is our go-ahead strategy for 2017 in India,” he explained. “For 2018, we have a different strategy – we’ll pump money into marketing but not what the competition is doing. We will do a lot of sports associations as well,” added Batra.

Aggressive advertising campaigns have helped rivals like Oppo and Vivo pretty well in increasing their shipments as well as market share. According to a recent IDC report, Vivo and Oppo have 13 per cent and eight per cent market share in India respectively, and a large part of the success has been attributed to above-the-line marketing activities and promotions.

While ZTE is currently testing waters in India and while the company will certainly come up with advertising campaigns, they won’t be as aggressive as those put out by competitors.

“ZTE has been in India since 2003 when CDMA devices came here. We were an OEM then providing devices to Reliance and Tatas. Till quite some time back, the mandate was clear – B2B – and that’s why you might not have seen much of ZTE into open market,” he said.

“Secondly, we’re are a technology brand and we believe in giving a product at the right price to a customer instead of taking more money from the customer and throwing that back into marketing. So we already are in the market and we’ve done a couple of soft launches. In February 2017 we launched our first product and the count right now is seven,” Batra pointed out.

ZTE currently has more than 300 service centers across India. The company isn’t planning to open exclusive stores as of now but this is something certainly on cards for 2018. “Once we have a portfolio of products ready, then making an exclusive store makes sense,” he insisted.

ZTE will be launching two smartphones in India pre-Diwali or first week of October. We’ll see three more products from the company post-Diwali. Elaborating on what kind of products ZTE is focusing on, Batra explained, “We’re going to categorise our products into three parts now. First part would be where we’ll have price-sensitive smartphones which would give us a good ground in the budget and mid-budget segment. The second category of smartphones will focus on battery while the third will be around dual cameras.”

“Soon you’ll see a dual camera smartphone from ZTE at a very economical price-point,” he said.