Spice Mobile today announced a tie-up with Huawei under which it would sell select Huawei Android smartphones in India under a co-branded Spice-Huawei brand.
While Huawei has its own retail presence in India, some phones will be exclusively sold under this co-brand. Spice would market, distribute and retail these phones via its chain of Hotspot retail stores. The company plans to launch 7-10 co-branded phones this fiscal and is targeting to sell 10 million phones that includes its own brand phones and 1 million units of the co-branded phones from its domestic and international handset business. Spice also owns the Nexian brand in South East Asia.
Spice Group Chairman, Dr BK Modi, said that the partnership is in very initial stages and does not include any equity or brand royalty. The partnership could eventually lead to joint development and even manufacturing smartphones, though the two sides are still chalking out the details.
At the moment, Spice has innovation and product development centers in Singapore and Jakarta. Spice will continue to develop and sell its own 2G and Wi-Fi smartphones as well as feature phones, while 3G Android smartphones will come from Huawei. Dr Modi stated that the company has also tied up with Google for its Android OS and will also offer free Wi-Fi at its Hotspot retail stores.
The first smartphone under the Spice Huawei brand would be the Ascend Y100, a Rs 6,000 3G-enabled Android smartphone. The device features a 2.8-inch display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, 512MB ROM, 256MB RAM and a 1,050 mAh battery with 5 hours of talktime and 300 hours of standby time. Spice has tied up with Airtel in Delhi and Mumbai, Aircel in Hyderabad and Bangalore, and Docomo in Jaipur to offer free 3G subscription for three months.
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