Coolpad has provisioned a USD 300 million investment for the Indian market for the next three years
As a new brand in India, Coolpad wants to reach out to the masses to establish the reputation and influence, strategically with the two handsets that they have launched in India targeting under Rs 10,000 segment. They were a big hit in 2015.
In an interaction with Mobility India Dr. Johnson Lou, VP Overseas BU, Coolpad, elaborates about company’s aggressive expansion plans for India.
Coolpad is leading the 4G market in China with cutting-edge products, thanks to its continuous investment in R&D. In addition, Coolpad has made forward-looking deployment of intelligent hardware and 5G, well ahead of the competitors. When the 5G era arrives, Coolpad will be able to provide products that better meet the consumer needs. We have brought many models to our partners and helped them to succeed. Now it’s our turn to build Coolpad brand. In those years, we were learning what Indian customers wanted. They want performance and innovations, which are exactly what we are good at. That’s why Coolpad has been so successful with Note 3 and Note 3 Lite. Its sales number has been more than our expectations.
What are your priorities before launching your products in India?
The first thing before entering a market is to understand its needs. We have seen a great demand for large memory and security from end users, especially at the current price segment of Coolpad. 3GB RAM brings stable performance. Indian customers particularly like multi-tasking and try different apps at the same time, so we addressed that problem. Fingerprint sensor protects users’ privacy. I have seen some product reviews: customers consider our fingerprint sensor as highly responsive and better than competition. We made this breakthrough technology possible for the Indian Masses. As a new brand in India, we want to reach out to the masses, first to establish our reputation and influence and that’s why we targeted under Rs 10,000 segment. It also matches our brand aspirations to be the brand that brings innovative technology to our customers.
What is ‘Make in India’ plan for Coolpad?
We have been working with Videocon for quite a while and almost every Coolpad product now is made in India. Our headquarters have sent many engineers, QA and NPI to Videocon factory and they brought advanced technology to support our partners. We have another plan which is to build a component supply chain. We want to bring our partners from China who provide us important suppliers and we want them to ‘make in India’ too. Thus together we can bring greater benefits to the Indian Mobile Industry. That’s the actual ecosystem we are talking about, an ecosystem of supply chain.
We attack when we are prepared; we seize when there is an opportunity.
Please brief us on your big plans for 2016 in India.
As per our India strategy for coming 3 years, we first entered India market through online channel. This year also our main focus will be online and build strong partnership with our online partner Amazon. Because India Online market is much like Chinese online market 2 years ago with super high growth speed. Also online business helps Coolpad brand to quickly establish its user-base and brand reputation. In Southeast Asia, in Indonesia and Vietnam, we have been mainly focusing on offline and achieved great success. This year, we will also start exploring the offline market in India. Online itself will not satisfy us, we do not want to miss that big cake from offline. India has become the top priority for Coolpad outside China globally. HQ will invest heavily on resources and manpower. Particularly, for 2016, we are targeting 5 million pieces sale. It’s not a big number, but for us as a new brand, that’s enough to grow step by step. We will launch 6-8 products covering from budget to high end flagship. Some of these products will go to offline as well.
What is Coolpad’s after-sales strategy
Right now we have more than 240+ service centers. Together with call center and Coolpad forum, we help customers and win their brand loyalty. We are planning Coolpad Exclusive Service Centers also in India. We will start with four stores and at least one of them will be in Delhi. This year, we will try to establish 600 service centers with many of them being exclusive centers in various parts of India.
How will Coolpad compete with high-end premium phones like Samsung and Apple?
Samsung and Apple both have large product portfolios spanning across devices such as PC Computers, Laptops, Tablets, Smartphones, etc. Coolpad has all its energies focused on smartphone technology and on building an ecosystem around that. Also these brands have built customer goodwill and increased market share over a long period of time spending billions in Ads and marketing campaigns. Coolpad started with a mission of bringing innovative and affordable technology to the masses and eventually transitioned into the top 3 brands in China. Coolpad’s over 6000 patents in technology and R&D centers across the globe help it improve the industrial manufacturing capacity, including multi-products, multi-channel and complete product line coverage.
We have enough confidence to win in the competition for 2 reasons: first, our R&D resources, which brought us 6000+ patents include great innovations like dual SIM dual standby. Second, our global layout is strong, we have robust market presence in America, Europe and Southeast Asia. Also, recently, we signed a major distributor in Africa. With robust global demand, Coolpad is all set to be successful as a global brand.