Transsion India seeks to regain lost ground in India with Camon series

NEW DELHI: Transsion India, a part of Chinese mobile phonemaker Transsion Holdings, has firmed up plans to regain lost grounds over the past one year in the highly-competitive smartphone market. It has lined up at least 10-12 launches under its brand ‘Tecno’ for this year, besides also ramping up its manufacturing facility in Noida to begin exporting devices to markets like Africa and Middle East from second half of 2020. 

“We have already cemented our position in under Rs5,000 offerings, now with our upcoming products we’ll be targeting the mid range segment (Rs 9,000 -Rs15,000) with technologically advanced and premium feature based devices,” Arijeet Talapatra, CEO, Transsion India told this publication. 

 On Thursday, the company launched Camon 15 and Camon 15Pro — 2020’s first dual offering from the company from its camera-cetric Camon series. Priced at Rs14,999, 15 Pro is the first in the sub-15K segment, while Camon 15 is priced at Rs9,999. The new smartphones will go on sale on February 25 and will be available across all offline retail stores. 

The company, which sells handsets under itel, Tecno, and Infinix brands in India, has seen a significant decline in overall shipments under its brand Tecno in 2019, with its growth declining 14 per cent year-on-year as of December 2019.

 “The launch of these two new phones in the sub-15K price segment is targeted to regain some grounds which Tecno has been losing to Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo as it has not launched any new models since July 2019,” said Prachir Singh, senior research analyst at Counterpoint Research.  

At the beginning of 2019, the Rs10-15K price segment contributed to 56 per cent of the brand’s overall shipments which has declined to barely nine per cent now, Singh added. Subsequently, its growth also declined 87 per cent year-on-year as of December 2019. Talapatra noted that the aim is to be among the top five players in the sub-Rs10k range this year.