Chinese smartphone makers are making a beeline for India, is old news. What started as a trickle last year with Xiaomi and Lenovo, has turned into the proverbial deluge with Gionee, Oppo, ZTE (Nubia), Huawei and a bunch of other OEMs from India’s northern neighbors rushing in to join the gold rush in the world’s third largest mobile handsets market. Keeping with that trend, one of China’s largest handset manufacturers, Coolpad had already announced its intentions a while back about entering the increasingly lucrative Indian market with its Dazen brand of smartphones, and on Monday, the company send out invites to the press for an event on the 28th of this month, coinciding with the first day of this year’s Google I/O.
Coolpad has already tied up with India’s third largest online retailer Snapdeal to sell Dazen-branded phones exclusively through the outlet. The phones to be sold in India will reportedly be priced from Rs. 5000 ($80) to Rs. 20,000 ($320), and the company has lofty ambitions of being among the top three online smartphone vendors in the country by the end of the year. That will put Coolpad in direct competition with fellow Chinese vendors Xiaomi, Lenovo and also with the YU brand from Micromax, for whom, Coolpad is already reportedly a white-label manufacturer. The first device released under the YU brand a few months earlier was a re-branded Coolpad F2 4G, according to media reports. Coolpad has been using social media to tease the imminent launch of its Dazen branded smartphone lineup in India. On its newly-launched official Facebook India page, Coolpad has been referring to its upcoming phone as being frame-less (bezel-less) and featuring a display that’s better than a common IPS LCD panel. What all of that actually means however, will only be clear with the launch of the device on the 28th of this month, when Coolpad will reveal its first handset for India – a device that has ostensibly been “made with the material, aircrafts are made of”.
Coolpad is entering the Indian market at an interesting time. The company has been having a tough time of late at home amidst increasing competition, and had recently announced a tie-up with the country’s second largest search engine Qihoo 360, to launch a whole new online-only brand – QiKU, in order to revive sales in its homeland. It will be desperately hoping that its foray into the Indian market pays enough dividends to offset some of the issues it has been facing at home. The invite and a few of the promotional material from Coolpad’s Facebook page can be seen below.
