HTC aims for No.3 spot in Indian smartphone market

HTC, the Taiwanese smartphone vendor, is lining up a slew of initiatives in the next few months to achieve its target to feature among the top three players in India.

The company plans to tap the mass-market segment by introducing handsets below its current lowest price point of Rs 12,000, introduce more waterproofed phones and launch competitively-priced 4G handsets .

It is already in discussions with 4G operators for offering bundling plans.

With a 2.9% share, HTC claims to be number five telecom operator currently.
Sirpa Ikola, senior marketing director for HTC South Asia, said, “Despite the fact that our high-end models are doing much better than our lower-end ones — even in terms of offering better margins to retailers — looking at the price-sensitive India market, we will soon be launching lower-priced HT Desire handsets for this market,” said Ikola.

Besides, rise in mobile data consumption means that handset bundling with operators is also something that HTC is looking at.

“We work very closely with operators to offer subsidised plans -- like six month data plans or free trial period data packs. This bundling has definitely helped sales, based on our experience in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines, as people want to use mobile data —especially for social networking — and are even willing to pay more for smartphone with bundled offer and top-up data later.

So in a way, data bundling removes the initial entry barrier,” said Ikola.
Manu Seth, marketing director, HTC India, said bundling also helped the company widen its footprint in areas it was not established.

“We are tying up with established operators in areas like Siliguri, Cherrapunji, for example. For operators, it is also beneficial. For instance, Tata Docomo saw incremental Arpu increase of 25% after tying up with us last year, while RCom earned more acquisitions with our HTC One tie-up recently. We will soon announce a data-bundled tie-up with another Indian operator,” Seth said.

4G bundling in other countries has proved so successful as to make customers switch from 3G to 4G, and in India, being ready with the product, HTC is hoping for similar success, he said.

“We are in talks with all operators for 4G for affordable offerings in line with affordable 4G plans, and are just waiting for right time to market,” Seth said.

HTC is also betting heavily on its ‘exceptionals’ loyal tech-savvy target audience of customers of between 18- and 34-year-olds to promote HTC through word-of-mouth.