Panasonic India's future plans

Panasonic Corporation of India, where Daizo Ito is the current Managing Executive Officer, expects to more than double the revenue from mobile phones by increasing its market share. The company with 10 smart phones already in the market, priced between Rs 5,000 and Rs 14,000, aims to earn revenue of Rs 2,500 crore from mobile phones by the end of this fiscal year.

With a robust strategy especially around 4G and aggressive launch plans backed by higher marketing spending, company plans to launch eight new smart phones in the next 45 days, seven of them being 4G VoLTE smart phones. Pankaj Rana, business head - mobility division, Panasonic India, speaking to ET said, "The mobile division contributed 15 percent towards overall India revenue, which we want to take to 25 percent by the end of the ongoing fiscal."

"Our upcoming smartphones will support all the 4G bands, and telecom operators in India," Rana said. This fiscal, which started April 1, the company will launch 30-35 new smartphones, priced between Rs 4,000 and Rs 20,000.

Panasonic doubled its mobile business revenue in the fiscal year ended March 31 to Rs 1,200 crore from Rs 600 crore in 2014-15 with around 3 percent market share and a sale of 1.5 million smart phones. Rana expects the company to sell around 3 million this fiscal year and expand its share to 6-8 percent market share by the end of the ongoing fiscal.

Compared with Xiaomi, which currently sells nearly 1.5 million smart phones by focusing mainly on the online channel, Panasonic is largely focused on the offline distribution but hasn't been fortunate enough in India so far. The Japanese company plans to retain its offline focus his year as well and will spend about Rs 220 crore on marketing, almost a fifth of which on digital marketing. The company's marketing investment will be almost double from last year's Rs 120 crore.

"Even though we have a focus on offline, we would still be bullish on digital as it influences customers and their purchasing," Rana said while explaining the company's move on digital marketing.

Panasonic's 80 percent smart phones are locally assembled by its manufacturing partner Dixon at the Noida facility, where there are six dedicated assembly lines for the handset vendors.  This financial year, the company plans to increase the assembly lines to nine from the current six, along with five packaging lines to support the growth in the market.

"By the end of the ongoing quarter, Panasonic will fulfill the entire domestic demand from locally assembled smart phones," Rana concluded.