Anker Innovations, based out of US, is a global company launched in 2011 globally and in India in 2017. Anker, currently present in 100 countries, has a wide range of products under 5 different brands and several diverse categories of mobile accessories and smart products. The company’s brand portfolio includes ANKER for smart charging products, SOUNDCORE for smart audio products, NEBULA for projectors, EUFY for smart home appliances and ROAV for smart car products. All these brands are aimed at offering customers the latest lifestyles in a seamless fashion. Mr Gopal Jayeraj, Head—India & SAARC, Anker Innovations, shares their company’s channel strategy, marketing plans and vision for the India market.
“All our brands have been doing well in the Indian market. Despite covid-19 and lockdown, we witnessed a good growth, especially in the last 4 months. We grew above 60% this year over the last year. And we are expecting more growth in the festive season and the coming months. We are doing well in all the categories we are catering to. We are particularly strong in certain product categories where we have few or no competitors. Our partners do not need to persuade the customers much to sell these products because ours are unique. On the other hand, our partners also enjoy good margin over these unique products. So we are expecting more sales for these products in the coming months. Also we want to bring out more unique products in the coming months and years.”
Anker has a powerful R&D and manufacturing departments that always strives to design and create products that are unique and different from the products available in the market, in a way that will keep the customers’ curiosity upwards always. Today, Anker a global leader in providing products, based on latest charging technology, including wireless chargers, car chargers, portable and wall chargers. Anker is also a pioneer in providing cutting-edge power delivery technology products to charge phones, tablets and laptops at unprecedented speeds.
“Coming to technology and innovations, we upgrade the designs and features of our product to incorporate the latest technologies. Noise cancelling, power delivery (PD) and ture wireless (TW) are the currently trending technologies and the products driven by these technologies are going to have high demand in the coming months. In our Robovac products, we are introducing smart and AI features. In fact, Covid-19 has pushed up the demand for our products; people are pushed to spend more time on smartphones, laptops and film viewing. As a result, there has been a surge in demand for mobile accessories and projectors,” adds Mr Gopal Jayeraj.
After launching in India in 2017, within a period of 3 years, the brands of Anker Innovations have emerged as the leading favorites of customers across India. Today, Anker enjoys strong presence across all the supply channels including General Trade stores, Large Format Retail, Organized Trade chains and Online channels at pan India level. Alongside the offline, Anker also enjoys presence on the ecommerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon. Anker’s biggest strength is keeping the prices same for the online as well as the offline channel.
Sharing about their distribution outlook and channel strategy, Mr Gopal Jeyaraj elabores, “For each brand we have a national distributor and then sub-distributors and then we have retail models. We have different incentive schemes for different levels. We are doing well across general trade (GT) stores, organic trade (OGT), retail chains such as Reliance and Chroma and also on the online channels such as Flipkart and Amazon. We working on further revving up our performance across all these channels to take our brands to the next level.”
Anker brings products which are developed keep the specific needs of the Indian users in mind. Anker’s products are affordable yet deliver quality performance. Anker’s teams across all their verticals work diligently and ambitiously to help Anker get closer to the dream of leading the mobile peripherals market in India.
About the importance of traditional offline channel, Mr Gopal Jeyeraj states, “For us our traditional channel partners are very important and without their support, during bad times or good times, we would not have grown to this level. So we thank all our channel partners for their support and we will continue to give our best to our partners perform with motivation and take our brand to the next level. We have drawn a few attractive schemes for our partners for this festive season and beyond which include higher margin on purchases of products cross-bundled between our 4 different brands. There are several schemes to improve the confidence of retailers, dealers and distributors, so that it will help the partners as well as our business to move forward. Indian market is witnessing a huge boom and the scope of opportunities is unlimited—disposable incomes are rising fast, adoption rate of smartphones is very high and the Indian market is huge—all these factors make India an attractive market for mobile accessories.”
Dedicated to keeping in line with the latest technical innovations, Anker continually provides upgraded products with advanced features. Anker prides on its durability, quality and premium built. Unlike many brands entering India which have been entangled in price-wars, Anker has established its own niche markets and reputation driven by quality, superior technology, strong channel-orientation and easy-to-purchase policies.
Now the government of India is actively supporting Make in India and vocal for local programs. Speaking from this angle, Mr Gopal Jeyeraj briefs, “As for Making in India, we are seriously thinking but it will take some time before we go into it on full scale. We believe the year 2022 will be the right time for us to launch Make in India products, because by that time our sales volumes would have grown to such levels that it makes it more feasible to manufacture our products on a mass scale in India. Over all we are very buoyant about our growth and success in the Indian market. We are looking forward to greater achievements in future, driven by our loyal and dedicated channel partners.”