Chinese smartphone manufacturers shipped 40% of overall smartphones in 2014, as we reported yesterday. Notice that this is China we’re talking about, not the whole Asia. That is just crazy in a way, Chinese market is huge and the competition over there is insane. Everyone knows by now that Xiaomi is selling a ton of handsets lately and the company is growing at an incredible pace, their online-only approach works for them, and it seems like other smartphone manufacturers are looking to get on board that train as well.
I’m talking about an Indian smartphone manufacturer Lava. According to the latest report by ET Telecom, Lava International is looking to unveil a sub-brand of its XOLO brand which will only sell smartphones and tablets online. The portal did not share any specifics regarding this brand, but did mention that Lava won’t partner up with any of the existing Indian e-retailers in order to sell their devices, they will launch their very own e-commerce site.
“We don’t want to do e-commerce for discounting and reducing the price, rather reach out to people who want to interact with the brand digitally,” said Lava co-founder and director, Vishal Sehgal. This website won’t only sell phones and tablets though, it will provide remote servicing of their devices and similar customer support functions, which is great.
Lenovo, Huawei and Micromax are all already using this model, well, sort of, and now Lava is looking to do the same thing. This company might be able to lower the prices of their devices even further this way, at least the ones that are being sold through the website, of course. They will avoid all sorts of additional expenses this way, no rent expenses, store employee wages etc. I believe we’ll get some additional news regarding this very soon, in the meantime, make sure to tell us what you think of all this, do you think that Lava is doing the right thing here? This business model will save them some cash, that’s for sure, but not everyone think that’s the right thing to do, of course.