For almost a year Micromax subsidiary Yu Televentures has been selling online, now it plans to expand its presence in the offline market. This year it expects that 50 percent of its sales will come from the brick-and-mortar channel. Last November in partnership with Reliance Retail, Yu had started selling its smart phones offline. Rahul Sharma the Yu Televentures founder told PTI that we did a small trial with them (Reliance) and we received an overwhelming response. The online route has done well for us. But there is a huge market opportunity in the offline space and that is growing. That is why, we want to expand our presence in the offline market as well.
He added that by the end of the year, the company expects to be present across 50,000 points. Xiaomi and Motorola, who are Yu’s rivals, had also launched operations in India through the online route. Today we find that they have expanded their presence in the offline space to meet the huge demand of their ever increasing customers in the Indian market. We are well aware that the smart phone market is growing very fast in India. The new smart phone Yunicorn, which Yu has just launched in the market for INR 12,999 will be first sold only on Flipkart for one month then it will be sold through other channels as well.
Sharma said that the company does not intend to influence its parent, Micromax’s distribution network. He also said that we are doing this on our own and are appointing distributors… In a year’s time, we expect online-offline sales ratio to be 50:50. Though he declined to comment on the sales targets for this year he did say that the company, which earlier had 5 devices in its collection, sold over 2 million units.