Less than three months after foraying into the Indian smartphone market in partnership with Flipkart, an e-com portal, Vietnamese handset maker Mobiistar has decided to introduce offline sales as well.
“We decided to move faster than we actually planned,” co-founder and CEO Carl Ngo said, adding a pan-India network of 600 distributors would be in place by September. This would create 3,000 jobs, he said, unveiling five smartphones for offline. At the time of introducing online sales, on Flipkart, in May, the company had unveiled two phones.
“It makes sense to go offline,” he said, explaining how Mobiistar aims to tap the potential in tier-2 and 3 cities where consumers look for information online but buy from an outlet. For them, it is the touch and feel of the product that matters, he said, adding Mobiistar phones in India are priced from ₹4,000 to ₹18,000.
The company, he said, was eyeing a place in the top five brands in the sub-₹10,000 segment that accounted for 50% of the smartphone market in the country. The phones were being assembled at a third party facility in Haryana but the company would soon start exploring opportunities to have a plant of its own.