Etailers in tight race for exclusive tieups with phone makers
biggest online retailers Flipkart and Amazon are pulling out all the stops to woo top smartphone brands such as Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and Huawei to exclusively sell their wares on their online marketplaces, as they joust for an edge during the Diwali shopping season.
Smartphones account for nearly half of gross merchandise value (GMV) for Indian e-commerce companies and is easily the most important category for top online retailers such as Flipkart and Amazon, although both companies have always downplayed their reliance on phone sales.
In fact, India’s e-commerce boom began with the sale of smartphones back in 2014, when Flipkart started exclusively selling Motorola’s Moto G phones. Since then, Flipkart’s strategy of signing up exclusives has changed the smartphone market and launching phones exclusively with either Flipkart or Amazon has become the default choice for many brands.
Under CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, who has been largely responsible for Flipkart’s push to return its focus on bagging exclusive partnerships, the company has set aggressive targets for the entire Diwali festival season sale, and not just for its upcoming flagship five-day Big Billion Day (BBD) sale. Flipkart has set a target to double smartphone sales during this Diwali, as compared to last year’s festival season sale, according to a top company executive. “During the festive season, online and offline put together, we want to ensure that at least one out of two Indians shop for their smartphones on Flipkart. Last time, we had one in three Indians shopping on Flipkart during the last festive season. This time, we want to make sure that 50% of all smartphone sales happens on Flipkart during the festive season,” said Ayyappan R, senior director, smartphones, at Flipkart.
One of the key partnerships that Flipkart has forged ahead of BBD is with Huawei. Huawei’s Honor brand of smartphones has grown four-fold in terms of unit sales over the past year, and the company has set an aggressive target to sell 1 million phones during the one-month long festival season sale on Flipkart. Honor has, in fact, signed a strategic partnership with Flipkart.
“Flipkart has partnered with us very closely since January this year...with that we’ve been able to move really fast. By February, we had sold nearly a million phones (through Flipkart),” said P Sanjeev, vice-president of sales, Huawei & Honor consumer business. “We now have an objective with Flipkart to give out the best possible offers to get us a million more phones (sales) during the festive season.”
BENGALURU:India’s