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Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo plans to sell locally assembled mobile phones in India by October. Oppo will join Chinese rivals as Xiaomi and Lenovo, which already make phones in India, to tap the country’s fast growing smartphone market by locally produced phones.
Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn will assemble the devices for Oppo in India, which also kicked off manufacturing Xiaomi’s India-made Redmi 2 Prime smartphone in August.“We are in the final negotiating process with Foxconn and we are hoping to sign an agreement in the next two months. We plan to have the first phones assembled with Foxconn by October or November,” said MartonBarcza, community manager. India’s smartphone user base stood at 160 million as of July and was expected to grow at compound annual growth rate of 23 per cent through 2017, according to data from Vserve in August.
The same month, technology researcher IDC projected that India was expected to overtake the US smartphone market by 2017. Sales of smartphones in India stood at 26.5 million during the quarter to June, growth of 44 per cent when compared to the corresponding quarter in the previous year.
Lenovo too recently began manufacturing devices in India through contractmanufacturer Flextronics.
The company’s sister brand Motorola’s popular Moto Ewas the first device to roll off the production line which will be used to makeboth Lenovo and Motorola smartphones.
While Oppo might be mimicking rivals in exploring manufacturing in India, thesame can’t be said about its sales strategy. The company is currently focusingsolely on building an offline presence in India unlike Xiaomi and Motorolaonline-only strategy.
Oppo isn’t ignoring the online sales channel, but isgathering intelligence about India’s e-commerce market. The company says it has adedicated team that researches India’s e-commerce sector and will use data tobuild and roll out an online strategy as early as next year.
