Samsung continues to break barriers and create new milestones

2017 – a great year

Year 2017 was a record year for Samsung India, and 2018 will be much better. We continue to be the market leader in India by a distance and through our innovations, trust and love of our consumers; we will sustain and consolidate our leadership in the smartphone industry.

In 2016-17, the revenue from mobile phone sales stood at INR 34,300 crore ($5.5 billion), growing 27%.

Early, this year we launched our flagship product - Galaxy S9 and S9+ in India, which have received extremely positive response from consumers. Last year, we launched our flagship smartphone Galaxy S8, S8+, which has broken records. In the second half of 2017, we launched Galaxy Note8, which has seen a huge demand. The success of Galaxy Note8 has vindicated consumer trust in us. 

We continue to innovate for consumers to make their lives better through our ‘Make for India’ innovations. 

An ever-growing Channel

Over the last 22 years, India has grown and Samsung has grown with the market. We trusted in India, in its ability to expand and innovate. Samsung saw an opportunity here and listened to consumers and developed meaningful innovations that made their lives better.

Over these years, Samsung has built strong partnerships across the country. Today we have the largest retail and distribution network with 150,000 retail partners and around 2,000 Samsung brand stores spread across the country, including the world’s highest operating brand store at Leh.

R&D driving Growth

We entered India in 1995 and within a year we established our first R&D centre at Bangalore in 1996. The R&D centre in Bangalore has today grown to become the largest R&D centre for Samsung, outside Korea.

Today, Samsung has two manufacturing facilities, five R&D centres and design centre and over 70,000 employees. Samsung R&D centres in India work on global products as well as develop India-centric innovations here under its ‘Make for India’ initiative.

Samsung’s ‘Make for India’ initiative started in 2015, and one of the first products under this initiative by Samsung’s R&D centres in India was the ActivWash washing machine that integrated a sink and a water inlet with a top-loading washing machine. 

The popular S-bike mode and other innovations like Ultra Data Saving mode are part of Samsung’s mid-segment Galaxy J Series smartphones that today make a third of the smartphone market in India.

Brand Positioning vs. Marketing Tactics

Samsung India’s key to success is innovating for customers. We follow the same strategy while designing all our campaigns, and have placed customers at the centre of all our campaigns. All our campaigns showcase the brand ethos of Samsung - helping communities and also caring about consumers at every step and bringing in innovative technologies to solve real life problems. 

In the last year or so, Samsung India has launched several heart-warming campaigns such as the Samsung Smart Class campaign and the Samsung Technical School campaign, which talked about women empowerment while the Samsung safe India campaign encourages people to use their mobile phones responsibly while on the road. Under the customer service initiative, we launched 535 fully equipped customer service vans, and resident engineers. This is ensuring timely service to consumers in the remotest corners of India through a ramp up in the Samsung service network, from 2,000 to over 3,000 service points.

Running successful CSR campaigns

Samsung runs its citizenship programs in three broad sectors-education, skilling and healthcare and each of these sectors have flagship programs running. All our CSR programs are aligned with government of India’s plans of uplifting citizens at the bottom of the pyramid by providing quality education, healthcare, skills and job.

Samsung Smart Class was launched in 2013 in association with the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti and is available at over 500 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya schools run by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. 

For skilling manpower, Samsung India currently has 22 Samsung Technical Schools in partnership with the Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) and Departments of Technical Education in different states. 

In the healthcare space, Samsung Smart Healthcare program provides innovative healthcare products such as digital ultrasound, digital x-ray and accessories to government hospitals across to country. 

Ranjivjit Singh
Chief Marketing Officer , Samsung India