Samsung all set to leverage and harness its entire channel community

Asim Warsi
Vice President - Sales
Mobile Business, Samsung

Mobility has become the necessity of the day. It is absolutely true to say that the present era is the era of mobility with laptops, smartphones and tablets ruling the IT industry. In fact, not only the IT industry but almost the entire business world is revolving around mobility. 

Smartphones are surely significant communication devices which users generally use for sending and receiving mails, phone calls, text messaging and accessing social media tools. Keeping the growing demand of smartphones in mind, one of the best players of the Indian smartphone industry, Samsung, has recently enhanced its product portfolio with new REX-series smart feature phones in India. The series consists of four devices – REX-90, REX-80, REX-70 and REX-60, all of which come with Dual-SIM slots.

Each device is pre-installed with an Opera Mini browser, enabling smooth experience for users.

Both Samsung REX-60 and REX-80 feature a Dual-SIM touchscreen with a rear camera built on the Samsung’s own phone Operating System Touch wiz. The Samsung’s Touch wiz OS has been updated and bears user-friendly interface that is similar to the Android-based Galaxy series. The OS also supports Java apps. The phones have pre-loaded popular apps such as Facebook, Twitter, ChatOn, GTalk and other games and social apps.

Asim Warsi, Vice-President – Sales, Mobile Business, Samsung India, has had an exclusive conversation with VARINDIA where he shares his valuable thoughts regarding the launch of REX-series smart feature phones, his company’s expectations from REX-series and retail strategies for channel partners.   

Kindly shed some light on Samsung’s latest launch – REX-series smart feature phones in India.

The REX-series smart feature phones are very new and exciting offerings from Samsung. These have been developed keeping the Indian consumers in mind and their needs for connectivity, for social networking, mailing, faster browsing and smart applications that they can download and play on these devices, gaming included. We have launched four devices in the Samsung REX-series of smart feature phones – REX- 60, REX-70, REX- 80 and Rex-90. The REX-90 is our top-end device in this series. REX-90 comes with 3.50-inch display with 3.2- mega pixel camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

How do you see competition in the Indian smartphone market where there are numerous big domestic players?

We welcome diversity and the presence of more devices and services in the marketplace becomes a driving force for everybody to innovate. The Indian telecom market is very vast and offers enough space to all member brands to come and play the market right, read the consumer right and do the business right. On our part, we are concerned in terms of reading the market and developing the next service, the next trend and the next benefit for consumers.

How much market share are you targeting with the latest REX-series smart feature phones in India?

There is no market share target that I would share here, but it would suffice to say that we are looking at the REX-series from Samsung to become a very unique and differentiated offering for consumers. In the sense that these are smart feature phones, these are not just the conventional feature phones that the consumers are accustomed to using. This series of smart feature phones will offer access to much faster browsing, e-mailing & messaging services, better application and gaming experience to users. A lot of smart dual-SIM capabilities are built into these devices.

Tell us something about your retail strategies that you have planned for the channel with Samsung’s latest launch.

Well, we are a full range player. So, we support devices right from the very high-end flagship devices like Galaxy S III and Note II in the range of Rs.35–45K to other economical handsets in the range of Rs.1–2K. So, there is a full range of offerings in the market by Samsung.  And, to serve that, we have a very vast channel network in the country. We cater to over a hundred thousand retail outlets in India. Specifically for the launch of REX-series, we are going to leverage and harness our entire channel community in order to be able to provide these handsets to consumers in every nook and corner of the country.

We would specifically not be able to share what kind of marketing programmes have been lined up, but I would like to say that it would be a full marketing effort and users would see a lot of visibility in terms of our campaigns and marketing actions out there to launch the REX-series smart feature phones. 

satinder@varindia.com