Comments
Fierce competition or festival sales by e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Flipkart, would not let down demand for its handsets at offline retail stores, a top official at HMD Global said here on Thursday.
Even though the macro economic factors during this festival season are not supportive, the company expects to do better sales than what it did in the same period, Ajey Mehta, Vice-President and Country Head, HMD Global told BusinessLine on the sidelines of a new launch event here.
“The macro economic factors are what they are, but this festival season will always provide a spike – whether that spike is 40 per cent or 60 per cent we don’t know. But, yet I do see a lot of offers made by the competitions. It’s a question of getting a share of that action and we are not losing on the share,” he said without sharing any numbers.
Apart from a dozen of launches of the Nokia brand of mobile phones this year, one major reason for sales growth is due to a low base and the partnerships it has entered with leading telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio for its handsets.
The newly launched Nokia 8110 will be available to Jio subscribers with up to 544GB of the 4GB data plan. Similarly, for the Nokia 3.1Plus to Airtel subscribers of up to 1TB 4G data on a plan of ₹199 or above, the company said.
New launches
HMD Global launched these two handsets on Thursday. While, the Nokia 3.1 Plus smartphone is priced at ₹11,499 and will be available from October 19, the Nokia 8110 feature phone is priced at ₹5,999. But, unlike any other feature phone, the Nokia 8110 is a stylish 4G phone with VoLTE with an access to an app store for Google Assistant, Google Maps, Search and Facebook.
Such feature phones are making the customers come back as some smartphone users want to keep them as a secondary phone when they want to stay away from all the apps and notifications, Mehta said adding that rural density still also has the market.
That is why the company is also expanding its offline channels to 1.20 lakh in the coming days from 1.10 lakh stores right now, as a plan to reach to the maximum during the festive season.
According to Counterpoint Research, brands such as Nokia is expected to give Xiaomi a tough competition this festive season because of a portfolio spread across the price points.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.