"While both Huawei and Honor have gone from strength to strength in the online space, we feel that it is the opportune time to focus on our offline sales. Online sales only contribute to one-third of total smartphone sales and (the move is) in order to realise our goal of becoming the leading smartphone manufacturer in India," P Sanjeev, Huawei India Consumer Business Group, vice-president - sales, told PTI.
The move by Huawei signals lower traction for products on e-commerce platforms, which once saw about a million units of various smartphones getting sold in flash sales.
Home-grown smartphone major Micromax too launched its Canvas 2 smartphones on Thursday for sale in the offline market.
According to Sanjeev, Huawei's aim is to strike the ideal balance between online and offline sales.
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"We saw immense demand when we first launched Honor products in the offline China market. Keeping that in mind, we decided to replicate the same model in India, which is a very important market for us," Sanjeev said.
The 5.2-inch Honor 8 Lite is a 4G VoLTE smartphone built on the latest Android Nougat platform. It comes with 3000 mAh battery promising 93 hours of music playback, or 15 hours of video entertainment based on the lab test. The phone has 4GB RAM, 64 GB internal storage and supports 128 GB of expandable storage.
Huawei is offering 15-month service warranty, along with door pick-up and drop after-sale service to attract offline buyers.
"We have seen a constant rise in the demand for our products in tier 2 and 3 cities, backed by the rise in multi-media usage in such areas. Consumers are now demanding a greater access to devices. There is immense untapped potential in tier 2 and 3 markets and we are now capable of satiating this growing demand and allowing consumers a higher level of access to Honor smartphones," Sanjeev said.