Obi Mobiles to launch smartphones for less than Rs 8,000 in India

The growing Indian market is attracting numerous foreign companies and investors. The current smartphone market growth has raised numerous challenges to companies, both, the big brands and the new one. Obi Mobile, owned by former Apple CEO John Sculley's Inflexionpoint, is targeting to increase their revenue in the fiscal year 2014-15. The company aims to reach by Rs 1,000 crore in the Indian market. The company is expanding its operations in India and targeting to sell 1.7 million devices. Obi Mobile will start selling a slew of mobiles price ranging between Rs 5,000 to 8,000. It is aiming 2% share of the market by the end of March 15.

According to Obi Mobile CEO Ajay Sharma, "People are migrating from feature phones to smartphones and adoption of small phones is growing. This is a right time to be in strategic market like India. By the time we scale up and close the year, we could be even looking at 4% market share." According to IDC, 44 million smartphones were sold in the country up from 16 million in 2012. Mr. Sharma said that momentous growth will continue and expect it to double this year.

By each passing month, the competition in the Indian smartphone market is getting stiffer. According to CyberMedia research, 14.5 million smartphones were shipped into India between Jan to Mach 2014 alone of which the major players including Samsung, Nokia and Micromax had 67% share. Apart from growing foreign brands such as Apple and Sony, other major players include, Karbonn and Lava.

A report says that the 70% Indian smartphone market is below $200 price and according to Obi Mobile CEO, Mr. Sharma, the company is focusing on the smartphones within this range as well as planning to bring Windows based smartphones by next quarter. As well as, the company will join the race of 4G devices and preparing to launch devices with 4G support in the midrange segment.

The company is expanding its business in the Indian market and invested about $20 million to setup a design centre, supply chain, sales and marketing network for Obi Mobiles in the country. It also has acquired New Delhi-based Iris Computers, an IT distribution company, to establish retail presence for Obi Mobiles in the country.