Chiranjib Sarkar, National Sales Head, Ziox Mobiles
Mr. Chiranjib Sarkar joined Ziox in May 2016 and he has an overall experience of 20 years with leading brands like Pepsi, Philips, Motorola and Intex. Prior to joining Ziox, he was leading the channel and distribution management verticals and was in-charge for strategy planning and regional profitability mapping at Intex. At Ziox, Mr. Sarkar is currently driving the brand’s physical footprint across the country.
Mobility India caught up with Mr. Chiranjib Sarkar to know more about company’s achievements and their future plans for India market.
How Ziox is faring in the market today?
Ziox is a purely Indian brand and I am glad to tell you that Ziox has done extremely well last year. Initially, when Ziox started, our presence was only in a few states, but today we are present pan-India and we are expanding rapidly even into those few corners where we were not present. A year back, we were present only in Maharashtra, Karnataka and West Bengal, but in the last 10 months we expanded nationwide.
What is the focus of Ziox and how you want to go about?
Today, Ziox is considered as one of the fastest growing handset providers in India. Our main base has been and will continue to be feature phones which contribute over 80% of our revenues, although we have a few smartphone models which we launched recently. Our feature phones range from Rs 1000 to 1200 and smart phones are priced between Rs 3000 and Rs 6000. Feature phones are still the mainstay for our company. In the last 10 months, we sold more than 2 million handsets. When we analyzed our sales, we found that recently we have sold a phone every 5 sec in the Indian market. Last month, we sold 4 lac handsets and our target is to finish with 3 million handsets in FY 2016-17.
Can you throw some light on your USPs?
We bring value proposition to the consumers by offering extremely good quality phones at affordable prices. The failure rate of our phones is extremely low. Indian market is huge and there is a lot of opportunity for feature phones, smart phones and also for accessories. We keep our basics straight and right and that is the secret of our success.
Please brief us about your distribution network and channel strategy.
We have a strong pan-India distribution network. We have nearly 600 partners, direct and indirect, we have a presence at 30,000+ retail outlets and we want to reach 70,000 retailers in FY 2017-18. We are strong on conventional channel front with regional distributors, local distributors and so on. We are also present on ecommerce portals like Snapdeal, Amazon, Flipkart, etc and on TV shopping mediums like Home Shop 18 and Naaptol. Soon we will foray into organized Large Format Retail.
Can you brief us about your service policy?
At Ziox, when we sell products we also sell service; service is an integral part of our product offerings. Today, after-sales-service is very important and those who want to succeed in the current cut-throat competition must pay attention to service. We have 600+ service centers across India.
Recently, we have introduced a 111 Days Replacement Policy for our feature phones. This policy is applicable from the day of activation or purchase (whichever is first). This unique policy allows us to build stronger connect with our customers and will assure them that we stand for best quality products & service in the cluttered mobile market. Started in selective states, we plan on extending it to a pan-India level.
In addition to this, we have an Assured 10 Day Service policy wherein we will close on any hardware issue faced by our consumers in a maximum of 10 working days. However, in rare cases, when we are unable to address the issue at hand, we will replace the device with a new one on the 11th day of complaint login.
What are your future plans?
We plan to sell 10 million handsets in the financial year 2017-18. We already have a manufacturing unit in Delhi and soon we will open another unit in Delhi NCR which will be having the production capacity of approx 1 million handsets. We will also manufacture mobile accessories, in addition to mobile phones. We want to become a brand that gives a comprehensive range of products and accessories to the customers.