Vivo scouts for land to set up second facility.

Chinese phone maker Vivo, which has won the Indian Premier League (IPL) title sponsorship, is betting big on the Indian market. The firm, which has a manufacturing facility at Noida with a capacity of 2 million pieces a month, is scouting for another location for its second manufacturing hub in the country.

“A team of 30 people have been working on this job. We are looking for land to establish the facility. We will identify the location this year. This facility will be bigger than the Noida facility,” Vivek Zhang, Chief Marketing Officer of Vivo India, told BusinessLine.

The firm is planning to export smartphones to South Asian countries from its Indian manufacturing facilities. “We are looking for(favourable) policies in terms of duties and other issues. We would like to export to the South Asian countries from India,” he said.

Quoting Counterpoint Research, he said the company now ranks the second after Samsung in the smartphone market with a share of 12.6 per cent.

New smartphone
He was in the city in connection with the launch of special edition of V5Plus IPL Limited edition, marking the inaugural of the 10th edition IPL on Wednesday.

The special edition phone will have themes around the cricketing event, sporting the IPL logo on the back of the phone. The 5.5-inch phone comes with 4GB RAM, 64 GB ROM and a 3,055 mAh battery.

India, he said, is a major market for the firm after China. “We divide the world market into three - China, India and the rest of the world market,” he said.

The firm, which began sales from May 2015, sells a range of phones with a price tag of ₹8,000-29,800. “We have no plans to launch the phones in the sub-₹8,000 price point,” Vivek Zhang said.

Asked what’s Vivo’s expectations over the IPL title sponsorships in terms of sales, he said the company was not looking at immediate gains. “We are here for a long term. We are not looking for short-term benefits. These events help build our presence,” he said.

Unlike some of its peers, the firm has built its sales and distribution teams to sell phones in the country. “We have over 70,000 people in the sales team. We are planning to make it one lakh in the next one or two years,” he claimed.

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