Lava International will invest Rs 250 crore over three years in its design centre in India, a first by an Indian company in the country, using which it plans to design and manufacture all its phones within the country by 2021, a top executive said. The company also launched its first designed and made-in-India featurephone for Rs 1,499, on Tuesday.
While the first smartphone completely designed and made in India will be launched in October, the company will also invest Rs 100 crore in populated printed circuit board (PCB) assembly, which begins from next month with 2.5 lakh units a month, and will be expanded to 2 million units over 2018.
“The money will go towards hiring engineers, setting up testing labs and bringing people from overseas to train people here, for designing devices in India, over the next three years,” Hari Om Rai, co-founder of Lava, told ET. “All our phones will be designed and made in India by 2021.” The company has a design centre in China, where it employs 700 people.
He added that the design centre being set up in Noida was the first step towards achieving a larger target of taking share of the global smartphone market, as it will help the company drive down costs of developing and manufacturing by 15-25% over the next five to seven years, when compared with China.
“We want to target the global market of sub-$200 mobile phones, which is about 1.3 billion by volumes and $113 billion by value, and we want to be the leading Indian company in that segment globally in the next 7-10 years,” Rai said. The first locally designed phone called Prime X comes with a17 day stand by time and a two-year replacement warranty. The company’s design in India initiative was launched by IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, telecom minister Manoj Sinha and former Indian cricket team captain MS Dhoni, who is also Lava’s brand ambassador.
Lava, which has been displaced from its position among leading smartphone makers by Chinese rivals such as Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, plans to ramp up its existing manufacturing units and adding two units by investing Rs 2,615 crore to increase the overall production capacity to 216 million units per year in the next eight years.
Rai said the company was open to raising more money, when it needed, but declined to comment on whether any talks were ongoing with potential investors.
