Huawei India announces mobile phone and datacard growth strategy

Telecom Lead India: Huawei India has announced mobile phone and datacard expansion strategy.

The Chinese telecom equipment and smartphone maker, as part of its growth strategy in the Indian mobile market, will strengthen its smart phone and datacard businesses. It will study further the tablet market before committing to launch more tablets.

Huawei will double its smartphone reach to more than 30 cities this year from the current 15 cities.

In 2011-12, Huawei Devices sold more than 1 lakh smartphones in India.

Huawei Devices is targeting to sell around 5 lakh smartphone and 3 million feature phones in 2012-13.

We will also finalize our mobile phone manufacturing plan in India. If we can ensure quality in entire supply chain, we will go ahead with our manufacturing facility. Ensuring right component is critical for our manufacturing strategy,” Victor Shanxin, president, Huawei Devices India, told TelecomLead.com.

It is targeting to sell smartphones through 2,000-3,000 outlets during the current fiscal. It will look at multi-brand outlets, around 1,000 large format retail chains and 25-30 online stores.

Currently, Indian mobile phones makers’ 1-2 percent revenue is coming from online. Huawei will strengthen its online presence since it is more viable and cost effective,” said Anand Narang, director, marketing at Huawei Devices India.

Huawei claims that it has more than 65 percent market share in datacard business in India. It sold around 4 million datacards last fiscal. Both 3G and 4G datacards assisted the Chinese telecom equipment maker to grow in the Indian mobile market.

Huawei will strengthen its presence in the open datacard market which is currently controlled by Indian telecom operators with around 85-90 percent market share.

The company is planning a slew of datacard and smartphone launches this year.

Huawei’s datacards are currently available in 500 IT shops in 10 states.

New smartphones being launched in India between July and December include: Huawei Ascend G300 (likely to be priced at around Rs 14,000), Ascend Y200 (around 7,500), Platinum and D (during Divali).

The data card industry has grown by 17 percent in FY12. Many new players entered the arena and clocked the revenue of Rs 1,260 crore for FY12.

With the increase of broadband usage and the launch of 4G, data card segment is likely to boost further growth in the Indian market. We will work with operators to offer reversed bundled data plans in the open market helping operators expand their data business,” Shanxin added.

Huawei plans to launch a series of dongles including Wi-Fi dongles, cloud dongles and Mini dongles for Indian consumers.

Recently, BusinessWeek reported that Huawei Technologies is poised to challenge Samsung Electronics and eventually even Apple in the $219.1 billion market for smartphones.

Huawei’s annual smartphone sales are expected to triple to 60 million units this year, compared with 134.1 million for Apple and 207.2 million for Samsung.

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