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Mr Sunil Dutt

R. Ravikumar

Chennai, Oct. 9 With a slew of new models launched in the last few months and a few more in the pipeline, Samsung India is betting big on its mobile handset business. According to Mr Sunil Dutt, Country Head, Samsung Mobile Business, the company is targeting 15 per cent share of the country’s market in the next 8 to 10 months. It currently has over 8 per cent market share.

Globally, Samsung’s market share, at the end of the first quarter of 2008, is over 16 per cent, and its telecommunication business contributed 31 per cent of the company’s overall turnover in 2007.

In India, this year, it launched the ‘Guru’ range of entry-level mobile phones in the sub-Rs 3,000 price point. However, Mr Dutt says that Samsung expects 40 per cent of its handset sales to come from the multimedia segment, “and it is this segment which we are putting our thrust on”, he said.

Positioned as next in technology with the tagline ‘Next is What’, Samsung is focussing on enriching its product portfolio across segments. “Consumers in the entry level segment have started demanding not only for long battery life, but also the presence of FM as a standard feature. In the mid-end segment, multimedia phones — whether they are primarily music phones or imaging phones or have a blend of features like music player, camera, video recorder, GPRS capability for blogging and lots more — are increasingly becoming popular.” “Our business phone — 1780, music phones under the ‘BeaT’ range and TouchWiz (F480) and top-end Omnia (in 24 GB & 32 GB versions) in the touch screen segment are successful,” says Mr Dutt. Currently, there are over 30 handset models in the price bracket of Rs 1,600 to Rs 44,500 available in the market from the Samsung stable, including Samsung Innov8 — an eight megapixel camera phone, which was recently launched.

The company has also signed on Aamir Khan to endorse the brand. In terms of the distribution channel, the brand is in the process of growing its mobile privilege partnership network and is aggressively tapping the semi-urban/rural markets through tie-ups with institutions such as IFFCO. “This year, we have gone in for regional distributors to strengthen our channel presence in each of the regions rather than having one national distributor.”

According to him, to provide better after-sales support to consumers, the company is also expanding its mobile service network by over 60 per cent. Talking about the 3G technology, he said Samsung is all set to partner with 3G. “We have 3G-ready handsets in the market,” he said.

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