‘We look at the market very deeply as we do not take too many short term decisions’

ow do you see the growth of the overall handset market in India and what is your strategy to sustain in the price sensitive Indian market?

With an excellent industry track record in the rural handset market, Lava plans to enter the affordable smartphone ecosystem. The company aspires to be a leading player in the feature phone mobile handsets ecosystem by offering customers with a unique value proposition and in turn create immense value for its stakeholders.

Shailendra Nath Rai, co-founder and director, Lava Mobile is a business professional with over 24 years of varied business experience and is considered one of the leading professionals in Supply Chain Management in India today. SNR has been a part of a sponsored research project of ‘Perpetual Supply-Demand Balancing’ with the Indian School of Business.

SNR has also co-promoted Pacetel, a leading OEM supplier to Bharti, Reliance, Tata, Hutch, ZTE and other telecom majors. Talking to VOICE&DATA, SRN shares the company’s strategy to cope up with the slowdown in the Indian feature phone market and his future plans to penetrate the smartphone market.

co-founder and director, Lava Mobile

HPe need not determine growth as the market itself will derive the growth. Pe have spent a lot of time on the consumer, understanding what the consumer thinks while purchasing a phone and how he will move to a smartphone. People who were earlier buying $100-150 feature phone now have moved on to smartphone. Simi- larly, the people who were buying a $3050 phone will not immediately move to a smartphone. Pe have to understand the consumer’s actual needs along with his other needs including music, multimedia, and application. Today, we have so many applications available but none of them are getting a very huge download as the customer has still not evolved.

Farmers are still not buying $100 mobile phone, they are still going for $40 mobile phone. I believe, the initial acceptance is going to happen in the tier -2 and -3 cities and within 2-3 quarters it might reach villages also. There are 2 kinds of operating prices in the smartphone market, one is the affordable smartphone and the other is premium end smartphone. Affordable smartphone market is still nascent and now it has started getting absorbed, whereas for the premium end smartphone market, we have a launched new brand called ROLO. So, in premium end we are focusing on just one product as of now, but in the mid segment, we will be shortly