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Naved Chaudhary, Head-Marketing Services, WYNN Telecom
When was the last time you heard that a mobile handset seller had 300 service centers in place and had sold not even one phone? The answer is here and now. Welcome to Wynn Telecom, which will start retailing mobile handsets very soon, but already has the service network in place. 4Ps B&M meets up with Naved Chaudhary, Head-Marketing Services, to get the inside dope on the play
 
In the Indian handset manufacturing industry, which is already thriving and heavily cluttered – with 16 branded manufacturers – Wynn Telecom suspiciously seems to be just another player. The company, which will launch the Wynncom brand of mobile handsets in late May 2010, refuses to be christened thus. Naved Chaudhary, Head-Marketing Services for the company, in fact mentions that he now has concrete plans to ensure Wynn Telecom becomes India’s third largest Indian handset manufacturer by the end of this fiscal. In an exclusive interaction with 4Ps B&M, Naved gives us the evidence.

Straight-up, the Indian handset market is cluttered with the emergence of new brands. How do you plan to break the clutter with Wynncom?
I wouldn’t consider the current market scenario as a clutter. Rather, it has more to do with the emergence of Indian handset brands over the last two years. The same trend was also seen during the boom of the television industry when every second company started manufacturing TV sets and there was a plethora of brands trying to bait the customers. But within five years, the market was left with only four or five major MNC brands and three or four Indian brands that survived after the consolidation that took place in the consumer durables sector. Further, one must also understand that the Indian handset market is really huge and you need players to drive this growth. We can be guided by the fact that the air conditioning market is small as compared to the mobile handset market but still has about 20 odd brands. So why can’t there be as many brands in the handset industry? I accept that the shift is bound to happen from boys to men. Moving on to us, there are many firsts to the brand Wynncom, which would help us break the clutter. We are probably the first company to launch pan-India operations on day one itself with seven mobile handsets and more than 400 people on board. To me, the USP of Wynncom would be our 300+ people on ground doing selling and our 300+ strong company-managed service network centres (under a separate entity World Ace). We consider providing the service factor as an imperative for the success of any brand and we are working strongly towards providing that to customers.

But introducing seven handsets at the time of launch?
I can’t comment too much about the portfolio prior to the launch but would like to tell you that yes, we are launching operations with seven mobile handsets in the entry level (utility) and the upgrade level with qwerty keypad (for youth). All these mobile phones will be dual SIM phones and will have features such as large LCD displays, mega-pixel cameras, high quality wireless FM receivers, high efficiency batteries, expandable memory cards, torch lights, et al. But all this would be available at affordable prices only.