Zen Mobiles - At par with Excellence
Deepesh Gupta
Managing Director
Zen Mobiles
There goes a saying that it is never too late to do anything you wanted to do in life. And this holds incredibly true in case of Zen Mobiles. Having entered the competitive handset market in 2009 in a slightly adverse market condition, Zen has achieved what few brands could have in such a short span.
Carved out of Teleecare Group, today Zen has a pan India presence. In the next 1 year it will be focusing on increasing depth and distribution in the western and southern parts of India. However, it had its share of challenges too. “The journey till now has been very volatile as this is the present nature of this industry. We are primarily aiming at reaching half a million units of sales per month by the end of this financial year,” says Deepesh Gupta, Managing Director, Zen Mobiles.
Penetrating deeper to earn volumes…
The volatile market situation also means that brands like Zen Mobiles start looking at the evolving C, D & E class cities and this eventually promises a whole lot of opportunities for them to grow. “This segment is the key for building volumes and we specifically focus on these small towns and cities. We are trying to increase our distribution reach further to these cities and offer them a range of products right from Rs.900 upwards and try and cater to as many consumer segments as possible in these cities,” Gupta assures.
To make this happen Zen works on a very flat channel strategy in which it directly supply materials to micro distributors who in turn supply the materials directly to the retailers. The flat system ensures quicker solutions to problems and better communication flow throughout the supply chain. Additionally, being in touch directly with the micro distributors and retailers help Zen reach the right set of problems and take quicker actions.
Zen also plans adequately to promote its brand through its ongoing marketing campaigns and branding exercises that are designed to place the company as one of the leading handset brands in the country. “We have traditionally used tactical print to build awareness and demand. In the coming financial year we will be spending approx 45-to 50 cr in brand building exercises across mediums and most of it would be to create awareness of the brand and to promote our smartphone category which are known as ‘Ultrafones’,” he asserts.
India being a price sensitive country, it is very important to have the right pricing strategy for the market. Zen on its part, before taking any pricing decision always studies the competition and segments they would be targeting in the market. It also studies the competing price points and accordingly plan its product road map and pricing strategy. “This is the normal procedure we follow every time we launch a product in the market as it ensures a safe strategy for us, without having to rue later for having priced the products exorbitantly or at too cheap a rate,” says Gupta.
Service woes…
Poor Service support has always remained a bone of contention between vendors and partners and the situation turns for a worse when the latter is unable to handle service queries from their customers effectively because of lack of communication with their principal vendors. To check into this irregularity that very often gets challenging to a partner, Zen has set up over 550 service points all across the country. It has employed a team of about 100 engineers and other back-end service staff in these service centres, besides a fully equipped call center to ensure speedy and up to the mark level of service.
Green is the way ahead for Zen…
With the world vouching for green and brands slowly waking up to the benefits of adopting the Green Technology, Zen has a Strategy that is purely in favour of renewability and sustainability. Sums up Gupta, “We are focusing a lot on making our products comply with the requirements of green technology in the near future and also their recyclability. We are working to strike the right balance of making our products environment friendly and also at the same time ensuring that they are available at the right price to the end user.”
Zen currently has around 25 models in the market and its current market share is approx to 2 percent. As far as the Tablet market is concerned, Zen has a roadmap of launching around 6 tablets in the next financial year.
samrita@varindia.com
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