Lava eyes 10% smartphone market share in 2 years with investment of Rs 600 crore in R&D, marketing

Home-grown mobile devices maker Lava International expects to capture 10 per cent market share in under Rs 30,000-priced smartphone segment on account of up to Rs 600 crore investment in product development and marketing in the next two years, a senior company official said.

Lava International President Sunil Raina told PTI that at a time when several Indian mobile phone companies succumbed to the pressure of aggressive pricing of foreign players around 2016-17 coupled with challenges posed by demonetisation and GST implementation, Lava focussed on its core strength and re-worked on the growth strategy.

The company relaunched its smartphone business with a small pause with focus on customer experience around devices and providing repair service at home, Raina said. He said that the company has realised that technology has to be competitive for growth along with visibility.

"With branding and product development, we will invest Rs 500-600 crore in the next two years with a large part of it will go in product development," Raina said.

He said that the company has decided not to load smartphones with bloatware -- which are pre-loaded apps on mobile phones.

"We have decided we will not put out any bloatware in the phone. We have taken some hit on what could have been earned from bloatware only because we don't want to compromise on consumer experience. I also believe that bloatware is going to be short-lived because consumers don't like it and what consumers don't like doesn't last long," Raina said.

He said that consumers are very unhappy about bloatware because they get irritated with unwanted advertisements, unwanted notifications and bloatware makes devices slow and very vulnerable to security issues.

Raina said most of the brands are not providing software updates on the devices that patch security loopholes and improve performances of the devices. "In the last 2-3 years, we have not missed any single update," he said.

Raina said that the company has over 800 service centres but still decided to come up with "service at home" where the company sends engineers to the home of consumers for repair. "In Agni 2, we have gone a step ahead and started giving replacement at home if their is any hardware fault," he said.

While the India smartphone market has recorded continuous decline in shipment since April 2022, Raina said that with new strategy Lava's smartphone business grew over 200 per cent last year and this year it is growing at the rate of 300 per cent.

"We expect to grow by 100 per cent on average in the next 2-3 years. Our plan is to get 10 per cent market share in sub-Rs 30,000 price range smartphones. Right now we have around 2 per cent share," he said.

Lava president said that the company will leverage its retail channel strength as well as boost online growth to meet the target. The company at present sells products through 1.2 lakh retail stores which largely include feature phones only. Lava claims to have 25 per cent share in the feature phone segment.

"We will fully leverage our offline strength. As of now we sell our product through 1.2 lakh retailers. Smartphones are not present in the entire 100 per cent of that universe. We will look at taking smartphones to most of the outlets and strong presence across all geographies in the country," Raina said.

Lava also plans to strengthen online business to meet its target. "Online earlier used to account for 10 per cent of our total sales. Now online contributes 25 per cent of our total which we will grow further," Raina said.

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