“Gionee Provides Super Service to Customers”: Alok Shrivastava, Gionee India

In a one on one with PC Quest Alok Shrivastava, Regional Director North, Gionee India shares the marketing strategies and talks about upcoming launches of the company.

Alok Shrivastava, Regional Director North, Gionee India

With awaiting launch of M7 Power, right now what is the product portfolio of Gionee?
Gionee has always in a philosophy that it will not launch number of models and in each of the price segment it should have one model. In terms of price point, we have one model in 10K, one in 10K to 15K,
same in the upper categories. Very soon Gionee is going to launch new models in the range of 15k, 13k and 19k. There are 4-5 models to launch and all the models will be in 4G. In December we will have
another range of portfolio. They all will be on the theme ‘super selfie and super battery’.

What are the latest trends you are seeing in mobile Industry?
At the price point of 8k to 25k there is not too much difference in terms of features. So it’s just about some theme which you have to capture like selfie camera is the theme and this price point. So we have this theme of ‘super selfie and super battery’. In terms of retail landscape, we are seeing a chain of stores which are becoming bigger and bigger. In chain stores each shopkeeper has now 7 to 6 stores. Right now, we have 40,000 outlets including LFRs. We also have 100 exclusive stores and partners who we are planning to make 250 by this financial year.

From where are you getting most traction, is it offline or online platform?
Gionee has always been an offline brand. We have never built too much in online space. Gionee wants to build the brand where it can provide good product to customer with good price. And the big reason of not doing online marketing is that we don’t want to disturb or lose our offline partners. We have 70% to 80% traction from offline and hardly 5% from offline so we don’t want to compromise on our price. So we will continue with offline and investing in building brand will continue.

What is the GTM strategy of Gionee?
is in a stage where it has almost revamped from price point perspective. The entire range of product has been moved to 8K to 25K or beyond that. We believe in giving good experience to our customers in terms of services. Gionee is known for its battery for life in the market and super selfie about a super camera which can let you click good selfie’s.
We build quality in our products which makes us different from other brands. The company is growing very fast in India leaving the entire Indian brand behind in the market. We have maintained our position in the business with 600 hundred market share.

What is your channel structure? How many cities Gionee has reached out?
Channel is essentially offline and we have 20 national distributors and 600 regional distributors. There are number of retailers who supply our products. In terms of number of cities, we are there till T4 towns.
And in all towns we have around 50000 or above customers. Currently we have 600 service centres. From last year we become more active in terms of establishing the centres all over the country as we don’t want our customers to go to other service centre or should get the experience of other brand as well.

Tell us about your manufacturing unit?
We have 2 manufacturing units, one is at Noida and another one is at Hyderabad. As Gionee’s strategy is manufacturing we have also signed MoU with Haryana government. Therefore the company is
in process of finalizing plans for having its own factory in Faridabad, Haryana. We have planned a fully integrated factory so all our suppliers who manufacture for us will be in the same project. But
this will take some time. We are working on it; maybe it will take more than 1 year.