At a time when the Indian market is flooded with low-cost Chinese smartphones, yet another Chinese telecom equipment major, ZTE, is set to launch smartphones in India.

Will this be another “me too” Chinese company, trying to copy iPhone designs and bundling it with features that cost companies like Samsung twice as much? Probably not.

ZTE is not new to the Indian market. The company has been selling its telecom equipment in India to the likes of Airtel and Vodafone since 1999.

So, it did take a long time for them to enter India with their smartphones. And in the meanwhile, the market has become extremely crowded.

Therefore, to create a niche, the company wants to tap into the rural market, which still remains largely untapped. “Rural market is where we see the real growth coming from. It is a tough market to operate in and therefore remains largely untapped,” Sachin Batra, CMO of ZTE India told BusinessLine .

“We are creating new partners and training them to ensure we have a large enough presence across the country. We would have 25,000 retail touch points with the help of this initiative in the next few months,” Batra said.

Rising in the US

With its low cost handsets, ZTE has already quietly become the fourth largest smartphone vendor in the US.

In India too, the company will focus on the entry level market segment even though it does plan to launch its flagship devices just to highlight its engineering capabilities.

“We will focus on smartphones priced between ₹7,000-15,000, which is where the bulk of the demand lies,” Batra said. The company plans to mark its India launch with eight smartphones under the Blade series in mid-January. Six of these smartphones, mostly the entry level ones, will be sold only through the offline channel while the two higher end ones will sell through e-commerce platforms.

By mid-2017, ZTE will bring in its higher end phones as well as smart devices such as a smart home router, a smart watch and a smart projector, all of which would be mostly targeted at the urban buyers.

ZTE is also gearing up to launch its manufacturing facility in the country.

According to Batra, the company is already in talks to start 2-3 contract manufacturing facilities in India and would be investing heavily in brand building through various marketing campaigns in the next few months.

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