XOLO the e-brand of Lava International Ltd completed 5 years of successful operations in India recently. Mobility India caught up with Mr. Raina for a quick interview and here’s what he had to say about XOLO and its road ahead in India.
“Earlier we were selling offline, but now we are available exclusively online. After studying the mindset of the online buyers and their preferences, we took a conscious decision to shift online. Our approach is simple, instead of quickly drifting along with the trends in the industry, it is always better to take a step back and study these trends before marching forward. When we focus too much on the short term perspective, it overshadows the long term outlook. Offline and online have different dynamics. Most people think low price and high specs sell well online, but it is not that simple. Awareness of the customers who purchase online is quite high. Today, people are giving more preference to user experience rather than just relying blindly on the specifications. The customers’ expectations are shifting more from hardware side to the software & performance side. Seamless integration of hardware and software to provide a great user experience is critical. For example, now there is a craze for dual-camera phones, and in 6 months every vendor will come up with dual-camera phones. The difference will be just where each of the two cameras will be positioned—here the difference is about the layout, not technology. All devices that XOLO has brought to the market in recent past came with a great package of user experience and that is our key differentiator.”
Since its inception in 2012, XOLO has been at the forefront of creating a superior smartphone experience and has partnered with industry leaders including Intel, NVIDIA, Broadcom, Mediatek, AMD, Microsoft and Qualcomm, amongst others, to bring differential technology experiences for those seeking more from the device.
Mr. Raina comments, “There is always a tradeoff between the specs and the experience the handset can offer. If we offer more specs in a budget, user experience may suffer. Instead of offering more specs, we focus on giving added experience at the same cost. We will have around 4-5 devices available online at any point in time. In the recent past, we did not market ourselves that much as we focused more on building better experience on the devices, but we will be focusing more on the promotion side soon. Right now, we have three device models for sale and by September; we would be launching 3 more devices. In whichever price-segment our devices are present, we are among the top sellers.
Mr. Raina reveals, “On the service front, Lava and XOLO have common service centers. We have one of the largest and most efficient service network and it is only getting better by the day. Many brands enter with a bang and vanish with a bang. In the last 5 five years, we have proved that we are here to stay—maybe there were some ups and downs, but overall we remained in the fray and will remain so. We are happy with our progress and will continue to offer high quality and differential experience products to our customers.