The private label play is catching up fast with ecommerce majors, especially in India. Over a month after Flipkart launched its own smartphone Billion Capture+, reports suggest that Amazon India is set to expand its private label play with the launch of a smartphone under the brand ‘Tenor’.
While this is the first smartphone it will be introducing in India, Economic Times reports that this is not the global e-commerce giant’s first foray into an in-house smartphone. Amazon quietly launched two models of smartphones – Tenor E and G – a couple of months before its Indian rival Flipkart came out with its own in-house smartphone.
"We leverage the customer data and feedback to understand the gaps in the selection, pricing and reach out to our vendors or OEMs to manufacture relevant products," ET quotes Manish Tiwary, vice president, Amazon India as saying
Like Flipkart’s Billion brand is a Made for India, in India brand, Amazon calls it 'Crafted for Amazon.'
While the smartphone market in India is already crowded with 100s of brands, especially Chinese ones dominating the market, ET quotes experts as saying that the private label market in India for smartphones is fairly nascent.
“The overall mobiles and tablet market would be at $8.5-9 billion annualised run rate in terms of gross merchandise volume. The smartphones private label would be targeting the local, low-brand and mid-brand strength of smartphones which make up almost 20% of the market, thereby making it a $2-billion opportunity for these private labels,” Anil Kumar, CEO, RedSeer Consulting told ET.
Flipkart too, has been aggressively expanding its private label play over the past year. Apart from Billion, it also has Smart Buy, a brand for electronics and electronic accessories and MarQ for large appliances.
Under the Billion brand, it launched its first smartphone Billion Capture+ in November this year. The 5.5-inch smartphone comes with a dual rear camera setup and sports Smartron's tronX AI-based IoT platform as well as unlimited free cloud storage. The phone comes in two variants: 3GB RAM + 32GB internal storage for Rs 10,999 and 4GB RAM + 64GB internal storage model for Rs 12,999.