Meridian Mobile to increase its market share to 10%

Banking on the growing mobile handset market in India, New Delhi-based Meridian Mobile (P) Ltd is hopeful of achieving an overall market share of 10 per cent by the end of this fiscal.



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The company’s flagship brand ‘Fly’ was launched in June 2006 and sold 850,000 units in the last fiscal year and has a market share of 2.5 per cent.

Meridian Mobile is part of the UK-based Meridian Group and has established a strong position in markets including Russia, India and the UK.

The company is now expanding rapidly in India by developing a large offering under the ‘Fly’ brand. The products include feature phones, smart-phones and mobile phone Accessories and almost 80 per cent is being imported from Korea and Singapore and the rest from China.

Talking to Business Standard, Company Zonal Manager (North) Vaibhav Kapoor, who was in the city, said, “Our strategy is to focus on store branding and forging alliances with retailers. In the first phase our focus is on placement. We have reached 9,000 premium counters and hope to double it by the end of the second quarter, which will together account for 70 per cent of the over-all retail sales.”

The company is already in an engagement programme with the top mobile service operators in the country, has engaged 9,000 top retail outlets in the country, to shift their shop presence from 50 per cent to 70 per cent and to widen their hold from 90 to 150 major towns by 2009.

Also, the company plans to add new models to its existing range. Their trade partners include Pantaloons, Bigbazaar, Essar-The Mobile Store, Subiksha, Hotspot, RPG, etc.

With the expansion on cards and new launches in offing, the company is expecting a turnover of Rs 1,000 crore in the current financial year in comparison to Rs 207 crore during the corresponding period last year.

Vaibhav added, “In the last fiscal year, Fly had an overall market share of 2.5 per cent and every month we are growing by 50 per cent. So by the end of this fiscal year, we are hopeful about increasing our market share to 10 per cent.”

Elaborating on Punjab plans, Meridian Mobiles Sales Head (Punjab, Chandigarh and Himachal Pradesh) Ranjit Sidhu said, “We are aggressively increasing our market potentiality in Punjab. We have 500 dealers in Punjab and are planning to increase the network by 1,200 dealers in the next fiscal year.”

The company has 34 handset models and is planning the increase it up to 94 handsets till the year end. Their future prospects will be to position themselves as one of leading players of the mobile telephony in the South Asian Countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and launch CDMA mobile handsets in India.