China’s Phicomm to push $1 bn in India through five businesses

Eyeing its second most potential market after China, Shanghai‎-based smartphone maker Phicomm is mulling to invest $1 billion, or Rs 6,400 crore in India in a phased manner.

The company is planning to setting up five businesses in India by the end of 2017. The business units are mobile phones, (Small Office Home Office) SOHO, Enterprise, Cloud services and Intelligent Cities.

The company will decide the operations by March next year.

"We are going to start with selling mobile phones and SOHO, then get our R&D in place, then manufacturing base in place and the next is to bring in our data centres and Cloud services into India, so we can offer localise services off servers that are running out of Indian Soil," Jeffrey Fan, president of global sales at Phicomm, told Economic Times.

A top executive told the financial daily that Phicomm would start with $1 million investment for setting up an R&D unit either in Gurgaon or Bengaluru, and have a headcount of 50 employees.

Reportedly, the company may also consider setting up a local brownfield assembly unit on its own or may consider a second option of beginning contract manufacturing​.

Phicomm claims that it is a leader of S​OHO networking products, like routers, in China. It plans to launch these products in India by Diwali in India.

"This year we are targeting $15 million revenue. Our overall investment including local staff, R&D centre, data centre, etc would be about $1 billion," added Fan.

Phicomm is also in talks with at least two state governments for full-fledged manufacturing unit and may take lead in terms of investments coming from China or Taiwan-based smartphone brands including Vivo, Meizu, ZTE's Nubia and Coolpad's Dazen.

Fan added that India was their second largest potential market and that's the whole reason they have decided to enter with a full-fledged plan.
ET reported that the Phicomm has less than 1% market share in China and its presence isn't comparable with Xiaomi and Huawei in the smartphone market.

Meanwhile, Phicomm will launch-Energy 653- a 4G device priced under Rs 6,000 on August 10.

“We started on 13th of June, we are expecting to exit a revenue in excess of $15 million this year, coming from sale of around 100,000 smartphones by the end of this year,” Fan told ET.

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