'Indian mobile brands lag in design ability'

NOIDA, INDIA: Longcheer Holdings, a Singapore based mobile design firm, while announcing its India operations here on Tuesday, claimed that in-house design capability of indigenous Indian brands is not up to the mark to support all handsets that they sell in market.

“Internal research and development team of Indian brands can support only partial products and not all products. They have their product development and they very well know the kind of product they have to sell in market,” said Dr Du Junhong, executive chairman, Longcheer Holdings at the inauguration of their India office.

Acknowledging this, Manu Nagar, CEO, Longcheer India, mentioned that Indian brands often have to outsource their mobile phone design work to companies outside India which Longcheer identified as business opportunity.

“This is the reason why we have set up our India operation. Now instead of companies moving out for business can directly come to us and present their wish list,” said Nagar.

Elaborating on expertise of Longhceer, Junhong mentioned that mobile phone industry is high speed product development industry and handset companies need to constantly invest in innovations in order to fight the competition they face from other companies in the market.

“It takes huge effort to maintain research and development. We invest huge amount in research and development. We have 2000 engineers working for us and we invested $50 million as our R&D cost. This constant effort has helped us in maintaining leadership in mobile design space,” said Junhong.

Longcheer has recently signed deal with Wynn Telecom to design one of its handset. Nagar further claimed that most of the top 10 Indian indigenous brands are customer of Longcheer.