Panasonic aims to sell 1.5 mn smartphones in FY'19

Consumer technology company Panasonic aims to sell 1.5 million smartphones to catch up with its target of garnering Rs 800 crore from this segment in the ongoing financial year.

"Our mobile phone business is going as per our strategy. We plan to sell 1.5 million smartphones this fiscal," Manish Sharma, President & CEO Panasonic India and South Asia told PTI.

Sharma said the company is looking at mobile phone business in a strategic manner as a key component of overall connected device business of Panasonic.

"Our focus is to get 4-5 per cent market share in mobile phone segment priced in the range of Rs 20,000-Rs 25,000 a unit," Sharma said.

He said the company sells many phones in the range of Rs 7,000-13,000 and will soon come up with offerings in the the range of Rs 12,000-18,000, as per the company's plan to upgrade technology.

"We are not focussing on market share but consumer experience with respect to all our product range that we have. By end of this fiscal, we expect to have slightly less than 3 per cent market share in smartphone segment. We are not focussing on scaling up sales volume," Sharma said.

The company is also ramping up its manufacturing facility from November.

"We will move from semi-knocked down (SKD) level of manufacturing to completely knocked down (CKD) manufacturing from November," Sharma said.

In SKD level of manufacturing, components come fixed at motherboard of mobile phones and all the parts are assembled, while in CKD level the components are populated at the factory of the device maker.

Panasonic Thursday launched its flagship artificial intelligence enabled dual 4G SIM smartphones -- Eluga X1 and X1 Pro-- priced at Rs 22,990 and Rs 26,990, respectively.

The company has come up with its proprietary platform Arbo on these phones where Panasonic will look at integrating third party application as it plans to launch internet of things (IoT) enabled consumer appliances in the coming days.