Narayanan V Homegrown mobile manufacturer Lava International, which recently announced a plan to shift its entire mobile R&D, design and manufacturing for the export market from China to India — is aiming to capture a 5 per cent share of India's crowded smartphone market by 2021.
“In 2021, we are targeting to cross 5 per cent market share in smartphones,” Sunil Raina, President and Business head, Lava International said on Thursday.
Customisable phone
He was addressing a virtual press conference to announce the launch of the ‘MyZ’ range of smartphones. Touted to be the world’s first made-to-order phones, MyZ allows customers to choose components such as camera, memory, storage capacity and colour from the company’s website.
“The world's first customisable phone from Lava will enable customers to choose from up to 66 combinations of camera, RAM, ROM and colour. This will give them the freedom of choice. They can customise and upgrade their phones at any time based on their needs,” Raina said.
Later, responding to a query from BusinessLine , Raina said: “We have a ₹800-crore investment plan to expand our local manufacturing and designing capabilities. We have enhanced our production capacity to 30 million smartphones and 45 million feature phones and are looking to expand it further.”
Last May, Lava had announced that it would shift production from China to India within six months and invest ₹800 crore to expand its local manufacturing and R&D following the production linked incentive (PLI) scheme announced by the Indian government.
“We had our manufacturing earlier in China because India did not have that ecosystem available then. But after we shifted our manufacturing to India, we have raised our capacity to 5 crore phones annually, which is roughly 40 lakh phones per month,” Raina said.
The company is also looking to expand its service network. “Currently, we have 800 service centre locations and 100 mobile service centres and we are planning to add 200 more mobile service centres in the next couple of months,” Raina said.
According to Counterpoint Research, Samsung dominates the Indian smartphone market with a share of 24 per cent during July-September 2020. It was followed by a host of Chinese players such as Xiaomi (23 per cent), Vivo (16 per cent), Realme (15 per cent) and Oppo (10 per cent). Lava and other brands such as Apple, LG, Huawei among others collectively account for 11 per cent of the Indian smartphone market, according to the report.
On export options for newly-launched customisable smartphones, Raina said, “We have our operations in roughly 22 more countries and we will see the response in India and post that we would like to take it to every country where we are operational and if it is valuable for consumers. We will definitely be looking at exports.”
Lava’s business split between domestic and export sales is currently in the ratio of 90-10 per cent.