Mobiistar to tap offline retail market to grow India business

Vietnamese handset company Mobiistar today said it will start selling its devices through brick-and-mortar stores in India as part of the efforts to ramp up business in the country.

The company, which competes against the likes of Samsung, Xiaomi and a host of Chinese and Indian phone brands, had forayed into the Indian market in May this year through online channel.

"India is a major focus market for us and we have received good response in the last few months. We are now signing up distributors to expand our presence in the offline retail market as brick-and-mortar stores still account for about 70 per cent of phone sales in India," Mobiistar Group CEO Carl Ngo told PTI.


Declining to comment on the sales numbers so far, Ngo said the product line-up for offline stores will be different from the portfolio sold online.

A number of handset makers, including the likes of Motorola and Xiaomi, have taken this approach of starting with online presence and then adding brick-and-mortar stores to their sales channels.

"We are taking a phased approach. We will target the top 50 cities and then look at a pan-India presence. We aim to onboard about 600 distributors by the end of the fiscal," Ngo said.

The company aims to capture a spot among the top 5 in the under Rs 10,000 smartphone segment, which accounts for a significant chunk of the offline sales in India.

India is one of the world's largest smartphone markets and growing steadily. In the last few quarters, a number of new players like Tambo and Britzo have entered the Indian market to cash in on the opportunity.

As per research firm IDC, Indian smartphone market witnessed 14 per cent annual growth with a total shipment of 124 million units in 2017, making it the fastest growing region amongst the top 20 smartphone markets globally.