Dubai: Spice Global, makers of Spice mobile phones, is venturing into the Gulf market in bid to capture a bigger pie of the low-end sector.
“We want to take a market that is ignored in the region, like the low to mid-end sectors. We have no intention of taking on Samsung and iPhone,” Anand Krishnan, CEO of Spice Middle East, told Gulf News.
Spice will be launching five handsets with prices ranging from Dh79 to Dh1,200 and one tablet model in the UAE.
“Even though we are launching only one tablet in the UAE at the moment, we are not focusing more on that as the tablet market is very competitive,” Krishnan said.
Spice is the first handset manufacturer to launch a smartphone with a 5MP front camera. Most of the smartphones have 2MP front-facing camera.
The Singapore headquartered company is listed on Singapore and India stock exchanges and is available in Malaysia, India, Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka.
“We are expanding our geographical presence from Ivory Coast to Indonesia. We are always fuelled by the desire to make a difference, bring about a change for the better,” he said.
Tie-up
He said Spice has tied up Mediatek, Qualcomm and an exclusive tie-up with Coolpad, the number three Chinese smartphone manufacturer after Huawei and ZTE.
A report in May by Sino Market Research attributed 10.2 per cent of China’s smartphone market to Coolpad in the first quarter of this year, behind Samsung and Lenovo. Coolpad beat Apple by nearly four percentage points and Huawei by 0.2.
Spice has named Fatima Group as the distributor for Spice phones in the UAE.
“The addition of Spice to our brand portfolio is very strategic and will greatly enhance our sales revenue and channel reach, said E.P.Haji Mousa, chairman of Fatima Group.
“We are targeting people who are not bothered about the brand and at the same time want features of a high-end handset. We know that the quantity is not huge but there is a market.
We are starting from the Gulf with Dubai as the headquarters for Spice Middle East and then will be entering the Middle East and African markets,” he said.
Apps
The advantage of the Spice, he said is that we are developing our own apps and we will be developing Arabic apps to gain further ground in the region. We have our own cloud service called Spice Cloud.
“We are in talks with telco operators in the region and it will be one of our key focus areas. Co-branding is one possibility we can easily do. We have the knowhow and it can be easily customisable depending on the region,” he said.
Spice hasn’t set any crazy targets for the next couple of years. “We want to start slowly and capture the market,” he said.
