LeEco to ramp up offline presence in India

Chinese smartphone maker LeEco, which entered India this February through a tieup with Flipkart, will ramp up its offline presence in the coming months. Atul Jain, chief operating officer, smart electronics business, LeEco India, said it had recently begun supplying phones to stores in six cities — DelhiNCR, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

The plan, he said in a conversation with Business Standard, was to increase distribution of phones to 65 cities in the next six months in a bid to improve sales. Since entering India, LeEco has launched five models, with plans to aggressively increase this number in the future. Some 700,000 LeEco phones have already been sold in the domestic market, mostly with the help of flash sales on Flipkart. With an offline presence now, the company, said Jain, would begin retailing its popular Le 1s and Le 1s Eco phones and will gradually include second-generation models to the list in the coming months.

An offline presence, more importantly, is expected to fill key gaps in LeEco’s marketing and distribution model. A global report on multichannel retailing brought out recently by PricewaterhouseCoopers reiterates this point. According to it, 43 per cent of consumers surveyed in India still prefer to buy consumer electronic products such as smartphones offline.

This despite the growing influence of the online channel in the country. The findings corroborate what consumer device makers have been saying for some time now. Apple CEO Tim Cook, while announcing his company’s June quarter numbers on Wednesday, said his firm remained committed to setting up retail stores in India.