Chinese mobile phone-maker Coolpad Communications is targeting a revenue of Rs800 crore in India over the next five years.
The company is focusing on the smartphone segment in the country and is working on a strategy to come over the negative branding that Chinese handsets have in general in the country.
“Even in China, we are a premium category handset supplier. Last month we sold about 3 lakh handsets. It is a fact that there is some negative branding for the Chinese handsets.
But, we are not going to sell the low-end phones in India,” managing director Sami Al-Lawati told DNA.
This is for the first time Coolpad is stepping out of China for market expansion. It already has a presence in Karnataka.
“There are about 19 million users with two different handsets — one GSM and the other CDMA. This is the segment we want to target, with a dual model smartphone offer.
Unlike the grey market Chinese models, our phones are priced to suit the budgets of the premium segment,” the MD explained.
Coolpad has also tied up with Reliance ADAG for marketing the phones in India.
Reliance Webstores will distribute the phones in India. “Our distribution model in India itself will place us in a premium segment... In addition, we are also designing a shop-in-shop strategy for getting closer to the customers visiting high-end malls and shopping centres in the country,” Al-Lawati said.
Coolpad is also planning to invest about Rs400 crore in India for setting up a research and design centre.
The centre would look at various features that would make the phones more suitable to the Indian consumer.
“We will decide on all the finer details of the India investment plan by 2010. The R&D centre in India will come up in 2011. Though we are yet to decide on the location, it would be in one of the southern cities,” Al-Lawati said.
While Coolpad is bringing just one model into the Indian market at this point, it has already lined up four models for launch by December. The models are priced between Rs25,000 and Rs60,000.
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