Spice Mobility forms JV with Chinese Transsion

The launch will target customers looking for smartphones at a price range of less than Rs 10,000

Spice Mobility will launch smartphones through a joint venture with Chinese handset maker Transsion Holdings, targeting customers at a price range of less than Rs 10,000 that is currently dominated by local players such as Micromax and Lava.

Spice is looking at selling these feature and smartphones, currently to be made in China, through its stores across India. The offline strategy would also help it penetrate smaller town markets, where consumers are price sensitive.

"Our new brand (Spice) is targeted towards a young and stylish consumer with a new tagline 'Make sharing better' for Spice, " said Lin Qin, VP Transsion Holdings. While the five feature phones in the new range will cost between Rs 850 to Rs 2000 while the smart phones will cost up to Rs 9500. The brand expects a pan-India presence within 18 months.

India is witnessing a dominance of Chinese smartphone makers, who control over half of the country's market, according to study by India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra). Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo Mobiles has helped Chinese firms to own over 51 per cent of the market, while Samsung continues to be the single largest dominant brand  with 28 per cent share.

Transsion says that it is looking to strengthen its brands through aggressive marketing offline and online and building products for India.

 " Our engineers are keen on getting consumer feedback to improve our offerings and we will look at offering the best service in the industry," Qin added. He also added that they are keen on 'making for India' and graduate to 'make in India' after that.

Transsion's introductory brand iTel, which offers a 100-day  replacement warranty to consumers,  already occupies second spot in the Indian handset market with 9 per cent market share. Spice mobiles takes it one notch higher with a one year replacement policy. The other brands in Transsion's portfolio are Tecno and Infinix for phones, service based Carlcare, Oraimo for mobile accessories and Syinix for home appliances..

“For us, India is one of the top priority markets. We will focus on delivering high quality products to customers. We don’t see our other brands being impacted by the addition of ‘Spice’,” said Qin.