“Lava Focus is always on 10K range”

Gaurav Nigam, Senior VP, Head of Product, Lava International shares LAVA journey in an exclusive interview with PC Quest

How did the LAVA journey started?

We are a 8 years old organization. We started our business with feature phones and then moved to smartphones. Right at the starting of this journey which started around 2009-2010, we understood that we cannot survive only by being the manufacturers of the handsets.

Around 2009-10, we also created another organization in China, which is again a LAVA entity which was primarily focused on design and development. From then our entire R&D happens in China, this is the biggest USP that LAVA has.

No other smartphone player has R&D in China and that to when sales are done in India. We invested there for the R&D and today we have 700 engineers who work for us in China. Because of the R&D arm in China, we are able to do much more quality control over our products. Its all because of the R&D center that we are

able to innovate more with our products.

Where Lava is positioning in feature phone category?

When we started there were 30-35 models in feature phone category. Now we have modified the strategies and brought the models down to 9. As per the market share perse, the feature phone is still giving us more than smartphones i.e 65% and the rest is the latter.

What are the targeted segments?

What we have done over these years is that we have been competent in the segment of phones which are less than 10, 000 rupees.

We want to invest our energies in the working which will be at market operating prices. Our focused areas for future will always be within 10K.

With this fixed range, we try to meet the customer’s need. We are working on their needs like battery backups, breakage support , storage, display, long life etc. That is how we identify the customer needs.

We want to be relevant to the market and industry, that’s how our product portfolio change and get designed.

How do you plan to innovate with the 10K range of products in future?

The replacements might happen in this range only. The number will be the same that is 6 products.