Click to play videoNew Delhi: India now sports the world's biggest telecom brand in the true sense! Hutch is now Vodafone and the company is spending nearly Rs 250 crores to sell its new brand name in the Indian market.
Vodafone plans to paint the town red with its innovative tariff schemes, new value added services and low cost handsets costing Rs 666.
The Vodafone director refused to confirm this: “I cannot share pricing details but there will be no discounts or subsidised handset offers. Instead, Vodafone Essar may come up with innovative handset-bundled schemes for its 35 million consumers.” Company sources also said that the bundled handsets will primarily be distributed through Vodafone Essar’s four lakh-odd distribution outlets. “Vodafone Essar is also entering collaborative arrangements with some of the top vendors to achieve unprecedented sales,” a top company official was quoted as saying.
While CDMA players like RCOM and Tata Teleservices have adopted handset-driven expansion strategies to drive up subscriber base, this is the first time that a GSM player is venturing into this space on a pan-India level.
China’s ZTE, which is looking to set up a cellphone manufacturing unit in India, is expected to provide many Vodafone handsets in India. Early this year, Vodafone inked a global low-cost handset procurement deal with ZTE.
ZTE global vice-president (handset systems) He Shiyou told ET that as per the deal, Vodafone would offer ZTE’s handsets to its subscribers in India. “ZTE hopes to ship over 10 million of these to India. Though, we ship high-end phones to the West, our plan for India revolves around low-cost phones, which we offer in collaboration with operators there,” Mr Shiyou added.
The company will unveil the Vodafone brand on Thursday in one of the biggest brand transition exercises in the recent times. According to PTI, Vodafone will keep in-tact its predecessor’s assurance of following customers wher-ever they go, but will replace Hutch’s ‘Wherever you go our network follows’ catchline with ‘Make the most of now’.
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