Huawei’s consumer biz drives-up income in India

MUMBAI, INDIA: With the cloud-pipe-device strategy, IT and telecom equipment maker Huawei has been successful in expanding its product portfolio and sales in global markets including India.

The Chinese firm is expecting to close this calendar year at $350 million revenue from its consumer devices business in India with 10 million shipments. Overall, it is expecting 20 per cent higher sale this year than that of 2011.

In terms of consumer devices business, Huawei has three segments -- devices, cloud and chipsets - based on which it offers ranges of handsets, mobile broadband (MBB) and home devices.

"MBB devices have a strong demand in India," said Victor Shanxin, Huawei India's president - Devices. He claimed the company's global revenue has crossed $16 billion in first half 2012 and expect to end the current fiscal (Jan - Dec) with more than $35 billion.

According to Shanxin, Huawei earned $6.8 billion revenue globally from consumer devices business in 2011 and 75 per cent income was from overseas sale. However, for 2012, he stated that target is $9.5 billion. Overall, Huawei's consumer devices business is growing at a 40 per cent CAGR.

Company's handsets include feature and Andriod based smart phones in the Rs.6,000 to Rs.18,000 price range. Some of Indian telcos have been using Huawei's handsets and equipments under its label; however, it was last year that company went out in the retail market to offer its handsets to end users.

Huawei Ascend smart phone range is available in India and offers seven local language support along with localized content and applications developed by its research and development (R&D) team based in Bangalore.

It is expected to come out with the latest smart phones Ascend P1 and D1 models in the coming months that offers Huawei's cloud applications and storage to end users.

MBB and home devices include USB dongles, Wi-Fi and hotpots routers and modems, consumer premise equipments (CPE), digital-set-up- boxes and others.

According to P Sanjeev, Huawei India's director - Sales, the company is targeting sale of 60 million smart phones globally this year. "In India we aim to sale around 8,00,000 smartphones by December end 2012, while last year we sold 5,00,000 units," Sanjeev said.

He informed that Huawei is operating in top 35 Indian cities through Redington, which is the company's top distributor along with some 34 regional distributors and large retail formats (LRF) stores such as Croma, Reliance Digital and e-commerce portal Flipkart.com to reach to end users.

Besides, the company is setting up some 250 Huawei excellence centers by 2012 end, out of which 40 are already in operational. Moreover, it has a strong network of 350 service centers spared across India, along with some 1,000 outlets run by retailers.

Going forward, Huawei has set its eyes on tablets and mobiles phones. In fact, the company announced the launch of its tablets MediaPad 7lite on Tuesday to add to the existing competition in the tablet market.

Huawei MediaPad 7lite is powered by Google Android 4.0 ICS, comes in an aluminum metal body weighing 370 gm to offer superior qualities and features compared to its rivals. It runs on a Cortex A8 1.2 GHz processor with a 7 inch 1024x600 IPS multi-touch 1080 pixel HD display.

Company has priced MediaPad7 at Rs.13,700. However, the 10.1 inch version Huawei MediaPad 10 full HD (FHD) will not be available as of now and have to wait for some months before it will be launched..