China’s ivoomi to form ₹250-cr phone factory in India, to export back home

NEW DELHI: Chinese smartphone maker ivoomi plans to make phones in India with initial investment of Rs 250 crore and export handsets to countries like China, Taiwan and Korea. The company expects to have its manufacturing facility in the country by the first quarter of 2018.

"We are waiting for the day when we will have manufacturing in India and ship (products) to Korea, China and Taiwan. We want to develop environment and infrastructure here where we can deliver product to these countries,"ivoomi India CEO Ashwin Bhandari said.

"In the first quarter of 2018, we plan to have our captive plant," he said.

The company plans to invest Rs 250 crore initially in the manufacturing facil- ity, smartphone assembly and product development, he said.

"We will initially have our phone assembled at two plants in India. These are third party plants. We are in talks with Foxconn and Vsun. Next year, we expect to start our own manufacturing unit," Bhandari said.

The company entered India around March with the launch of its 4G VOLTE smartphone iv505 for Rs 3,999. ivoomi has plans to sell 4G smartphone in the price range of Rs 4,000 to Rs 10,000 a unit.

"This is the segment which has seen the highest growth.

We want to provide this segment new products with unique designs and features. We expect to capture 4 per cent market share in Indian smartphone segment by the end of 2018 which should help us in generating revenue of Rs 1,000 crore," Bhandari said.

He said that company will focus on product quality and use minimum cost communication channel to communicate about the product so that price of the product is kept low. "We don't want to paint all the walls in the country and then escalate the price of the product. We will use the right channel to reach out to our target customers," Bhandari said.

ivoomi plans to set up 500600 service centres across the country that will be managed by its captive nodal care offices.

"Every nodal care centre will manage 30-50 service centres. We will ensure that once a product issue reaches our nodal care, then it should be serviced within 24 hours.

"In phase 1, we will use multi-brand service centres as customer interface. By mid 2018, we will have around 110 exclusive service centres and then go for next 300 centres," Bhandari said.

He said that company will start selling products in select market namely Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi and Kolkata.

The company plans to hire 150 people for sales and after sales services.

"We will be building system, processes, software to use minimal human resource. We will target to hire close to 150 people by mid of next year. This will be only product, after sales, and sales. Post we switch on the product development, we will have additional manpower," Bhandari said. NEW DELHI: With over 32 mobile manufacturers establishing their units in Noida and Greater Noida, the government advances its move to develop the twin cities of Uttar Pradesh as ‘Cell City' or mobile manufacturing hub to give a push to Make in India programme, which is flagship project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Talking to Millennium Post, Union Electronics & IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the Centre is working in this direction.

“The Centre is planning to develop Noida and Greater Noida as a model electronic city, which will be a hub of electronic manufacturers. Till date, 32 electronic companies and 40 electronic compo- nent manufacturing companies have already established their units in the city under the Make in India initiative of the government,” the minister said.

“As we have a dynamic Prime Minister at the Centre and hardworking Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in the state, both the cities would get a major facelift and developed as Singapore of the country during the BJP regime,” the minister said on the sidelines of an event on Wednesday.

“Electronics manufacturing is a focus of the government as part of the ‘Make in India' initiative. The current investments have resulted in over 40,000 direct jobs and over 1.2 lakh indirect employment. We estimate that mobile phone production will reach a level of around 500 million devices by 2019-20,” the minister said.

Present on the occasion, UP'S Minister of Infrastructure & Industrial Development Satish Mahana said, “The UP government will work towards developing both the cities as electronics and cell city. Since over 32 mobile companies have already established their manufacturing units; it will give a big push to the imple- mentation of our initiatives to create employment in the state.”

Millennium Post had first reported in September last year about such proposal of the government. The plan is to develop the twin cities as a model city on the lines of Cyber City in Hyderabad, which is home to more than 1,300 IT and ITES (Information Technology Enabled Services) firms.

Almost every mobile phone manufacturer has already started its operations in the city. Indian brands like Lava, Intex and Karbonn have opened their shops. Apart from Indian phone manufacturers, South Korean multinational Samsung has also started making phones from its Noida-based manufacturing unit.