Smartphone Innovations | TelecomDrive.com
OPPO India is enabling lot of innovations within its set of smartphone offerings in India – whether it is the performance or the design of a smartphone the company’s devices are getting popular. And it’s Glocal approach to incorporate localized innovations is helping the company achieve greater success here.
Will Yang, Brand Director, OPPO India, interacts with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the way OPPO is moving ahead in India and what more can we expect from this unique brand in the coming months.
What is the business prospect that you see in the Indian market?
The Indian market is driven by the youth segment for sure. We have a clear target audience between 18 years to 30 years and this is quite a perfect match for us here in India. From this perspective, I think India has huge potential for us. And this target audience is not only for the Indian market but this is a global positioning that we have – in South East Asia, in North Africa and we have also entered into developed countries.
Can you give us an update on the India operations. How many units have you sold till date? What is the status on global shipments?
I already mentioned on the global shipments – which is 200 million (or 20 crore) smartphones sold across the world so far.
As per International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report for Q2 2017, OPPO holds the fourth spot with 8 percent market share in India in Q2 2017. According to GFK research shared September 2017, OPPO A37 and A57 ranked no.1 in offline sales for the price segment 8,000 to 10,000 for A37 and 12,000 to 15,000 for A57.
According to Counterpoint Research – OPPO F3 leads the INR 15k – 30k price segment in India, captured 24.2% of the sales the recent quarter (April-June 2017)
There are a lot of Chinese brands that have come to India. What are the key attributes to success for you as a brand?
There are three elements to our success. First is the product – so we have focused quite heavily on our products. From our first selfie expert Oppo F1 to the newly launched Oppo F5, we keep on upgrading and optimizing the front cameras. We have worked on the hardware as well as the software. So for the F3, we are the first to release a group selfie with two cameras.
Second part is about our target audience which is the young segment that we are targeting. We listen, understand and we are quite well connected with the young people.
And the third part is about Indian localization – we call it ‘glocal’ approach that is why we seriously take Indian considerations to merge with our global R&D technology and design resources. So these are the three major elements for our success here.
You have mentioned that Oppo has a factory in Noida which can produce 1 crore handsets annually. Can you share with us details on your second factory which is coming up?
The second facility is also coming up in Noida and it will be operational by early next year.
We have 4000 employees in our first factory and the second factory will have 1000 employees. And we will also be having 550 service centers by the end of this year in India.
Oppo is the first global smartphone brand to get FDI in retail. What does this mean to Oppo as a brand in India?
We work very closely with our distributors and they contribute a lot. And now with this initiative, we will be able to open our own stores in India.
What kind of Innovations can we expect from Oppo in the coming months?
As far as innovations are concerned, we have been focused on our target audience and we listen to what they are looking for. Selfie is a big trend that is still happening not only in India but on global scale. So will always be close to our customers and keep on innovating and delivering market-firsts.
On the business side, what is the percentage of business that comes from the online segment and what percentage comes from offline for Oppo in India?
We are mostly focused on the offline space. Our online focus is being given for our customers to deliver the current information on our products. But we still want them to experience and compare our smartphones at the stores. Because smartphone is not a simple device – people want to touch and feel a smartphone before they could buy it.
