CHENNAI: Making its foray into south India’s offline retail space, Motorola Mobility, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lenovo, entered into a pact with multi-brand retailer Poorvika Mobiles on Tuesday. Under this, the Chinese smartphone player will let buyers get a hands-on demo of the entire product portfolio and experience the latest Motorola technology.
Moto phones, which embarked on an online-only brand, are now being placed on shelves of offline retail stores that generate nearly 66 per cent of handset sales, said Sudhin Mathur, managing director, Motorola Mobility India. “We’ll also invest in setting up exclusive experiential stores, starting with pilots with large format retail stores... These will mainly come up in places where younger population comes, the footfalls are large, for example malls and airports… the next growth will have to come from offline.”
As part of the strategy to consolidate its offline presence, Motorola plans to open Moto Hub over 250 Poorvika stores across the 43 cities in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Karnataka. “While we’ll continue to be a dominant player in the online segment, we will sequentially expand our presence in the retail channel as we usher into the new year and we continue to expand and investment in the same to enjoy an equal share in both retail and online space,” he added.
Mathur noted that consumers are not shifting from feature phones to smartphone as fast as they are upgrading higher prices within the smartphone category. “The average selling price (ASPs) have started going up --- the feature phone at less than sub-$100 is not growing rapidly and transition was not that much in a double-quick time. Mainstream, that is $100-200, is the fast-growing segment and that is why within that segment the prices are also going up.
But the fastest is the $350 and above from a revenue segment, if not from a volume, point of view,” he added. On the company’s dual brand strategy had worked well in India. “We have grown from being No.31 in 2013 to being No. 3 in 2017,” he said. Motorola-Lenovo together command 9.5 per cent of the smartphone market in India with a year-on-year growth of 21 per cent.