India is the second biggest smartphone market in the world, and many manufacturers are trying to succeed over there. A lot of smartphone OEMs have entered the Indian market in the last year or so, and many more are coming it seems. The Indian government has started a ‘Make in India’ initiative a while back, this initiative actually benefits the manufacturers which opt to produce devices in India, not only sell them. It seems like the benefits are quite substantial considering how many OEMs plan to manufacture hardware in that Asian country.
Oppo is the latest OEM to join the ‘Make in India’ train it seems. The company has announced today that it plans to set up a smartphone assembly plant in India by August this year, and obviously put more focus on the Indian smartphone market by doing so. This plant will not only manufacture devices which will be sold in India, but also on a global scale. This China-based smartphone OEM has started selling their smartphone in India back in January 2014, and has managed to sell 400,000 devices thus far. Oppo wants to drastically increase that number, and they hope they’ll be able to achieve that by manufacturing devices in India, and by doing that lowering the manufacturing costs.
The company is planning to sell at least 1.5 million devices in India by the end of this year. Oppo already has 120 service centres all over the country, and they’ll open an additional 120 by the end of the year according to the company’s Vice President, Sky Li. Mr. Li was in New Delhi today, and during the announcement he said the following: “India is the top priority in our expansion plans in South Asia this year. We have received tremendous support and appreciation from the customers and it is now time to reciprocate the feeling.”
As a side note, Xiaomi has already announced that it will start manufacturing devices in India before the end of this year, while Sony and Foxconn have also announced their arrival in the future. India is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, if not the first one on that list, and some analysts even predict that it will catch up to China in a couple of years.