India surprises big businesses a lot in terms of revenue, and it will continue to surprise, only thing needed is to understand the right customers to target with a brand name in hand. The same happened with Gionee when it churned out its time while trying to catch Indian smartphone market while other big player were already present in the market. The market has been dominated by big players like Samsung, Micromax, Apple (in luxury category) etc. Hence while re-strategizing the whole market approach, Gionee has finally announced the hold on the manufacturing of the cheap smartphones as of now.
According to the Arvind Vohra, Gionee India CEO :
“At Gionee, we don’t want to make cheap smartphones as they end up becoming smart feature phones. We have a separate category for feature phones and we would love to expand, innovate in this category, If we enter this category, we are changing the basic specifications of a smartphone and this would not be appreciated by the consumer. We will lose the customer who bought the device to have a smartphone experience as his experience will not be up to the mark.”
Some might think that the decision is not good, but as a matter of fact there is still a very large number of population in India which do not show much interest in so called smartphones as they are a bit complicated to handle. The target is the set of the customers looking for the kind of the phone with the core competency of the high quality calling only (which once NOKIA had).
Gionee is focusing on more and more physical presence in the country. The company have around 32,000 retails stores in India with a large number of service centers in India. The sales of the company has been growing since last year. According to the company, it is generating a revenue of Rs.150-200 crores on monthly basis.
The company had a revenue of around Rs.2,800 crores last year and is planning to have somewhere around a Billion Dollar this year. The company is planning to expand its services to around 50,000 outlets in the country by the end of 2015 as a part of physical expansion process.
