Vivo to Start Production Under Make in India Campaign, Aims Six Percent Market Share by 2017

In December last year, Vivo entered the Indian smartphone market with its popular ‘Vivo X5 Max.’ Compared with the other Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Meizu, Huawei and few others; Vivo hasn’t been that aggressive in terms of device launches. Until now the Vivo’s portfolio includes ten devices with price ranging from Rs.6,000 to Rs.30,000.

While all the others manufacturers are looking to manufacture devices in India with the efforts from ‘Make in India’ campaign that made the process of setting up manufacturing plants very easy along with lot of benefits provided by central and state governments. Vivo also jumped into the Make in India smartphones bandwagon that results in making the devices cost comparatively lower since the government has increased the taxes for importing fully built smartphones.

In the July, Vivo has launched a upgraded variant of last years X5 Max called as X5 Pro along with two mid-range devices V1 and V1 Max. During the launch of devices, Alex Feng, CEO, Vivo India confirmed the Make in India devices will be manufactured at its 3 lakh feet Noida plant. The operations will begin within the next couple of months and will also hire about 2,000 people by the end of 2015.

Vivo for the first time entered the ‘top 10 smartphone manufacturers in the world’ list in Q1 2015, where it sold 9.3 million handsets capturing a market share of 2.7 percent. The company aims to sell 2 million devices by the end of this year and six million handsets by the end of next year. The Guangdong-based manufacturer is planning to invest Rs.125 crores by the end of this year in India and the company already invested 20 crores in setting up distribution and service centres in 20 states.

The Assembling will start from next month and company also wants to start research and manufacturing in the coming months. The Noida plant has a capacity of assembling one million handsets per month. The first batch assembled devices will be shipped by the end of this year.

The company aims to capture 5 to 6 percent of market share by the end of 2017. Recently Gionee confirmed their ‘Make in India’ ambitions by partnering with Foxconn and Dixon Technologies to start manufacturing handsets in India. Stayed tuned for more details about the ‘Make in India’ campaign in the mobile devices section.