India is focus market for Motorola, aim is to reach top 3 by 2025-end: Shivam Ranjan

Motorola has a 97 years of legacy in the telecom industry and also is the pioneer of the mobile phones. It has seen a lot of ups and downs in its nearly 100 years of existence.

Nokia and BlackBerry, which also faced the tough competitions from Apple and Samsung, could not survive. But, Motorola has managed to sail through tough times thanks to adapting to ever-evolving consumer habits.

In India, the world's second biggest and fastest growing market, Motorola after a success clam-shell flip phones in 2000s, made a remarkable come back in 2014 with the mid-range Moto G series. But, it couldn't do well for more than half a decade until 2024.

Last year, thanks to right postioning of multiple phones in diffrent price brackets, Motorola registered a record 135.9 per cent growth. It shows Lenovo-owned company is very focused to further increase the market.

"Motorola has a great legacy. It was the inventor of the category (mobile phone) itself, but has seen tumultuous times. Absolutely. We don't deny that. In fact, this is a category which is extremely challenging. You've seen brands disappear in this category and never come back. I think what we have shown is tremendous amount of resilience, self-awareness, ability to hear, listen to consumer feedback, listen to you (media), internal feedback, and be able to reinvent ourselves over a period of time," said Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing at Motorola - Asia Pacific, to Deccan Herald.

"We had a phase where, we were we were not doing very well. And we took a conscious call to do a reset. We went back to basics and invested more in our R&D instead of going out and launching new products at that point of time. Because we felt our products were not competitive enough. We went back, focussed on our R&D supply chains, and invented the business model, and we came back much, much stronger. Starting with roughly about 2021, 2022, you must be seeing the drastic change in our strategy in our pillars of growth, in our positioning as the lifestyle tech brand, and our focus on design, software experiences to differentiate ourselves, and not just play the hardware game and give consumers a reason to buy Motola and also continue to appeal to the younger audiences that you're seeing for us. globally as well as in India," noted Ranjan.

Motorola Edge 60 Pro.

"Now, we are in a phase of hyper growth from a period where we were in a phase of reset, we started scaling after that. And India is a very, very important market, a very focussed market for us, which is why you see, in fact, some of the products are being designed specifically for India. Some of the products are actually being announced globally first in India. An example of that is the edge 60 fusion. The first product in the edge 60 family, globally, was announced first in India. The ecosystem products, like Moto Pad 60 and MotoBook 60. Both of them have been announced first globally in India. This shows how important the market is, because a lot of initiatives that we are taken specific to India, and also giving our local consumers an opportunity to see us all our innovations first," added Ranjan.

"If you look at the Indian market, the size, the annual addressable market size, it's about 150 million units. India happens to be one of the largest global markets when it comes to the smartphone. So, for any smartphone brand, India really continue to be a very, very important market, but specifically for Motorola, it is a focus market for us. And we've seen tremendous success for the last eight quarters back to back, we've seen triple digit growth,And our market share has grown from about two percent to six per cent," said Shivam Ranjan.

"In the last quarter, we delivered 7.8 per cent market share, which is very close to what our ambitions are, which is to be the top three brand by end of this year. We are moving towards that trejectory very, very fast at a break next speed," Ranjan noted.

He also shared an interesting data showing premium phones are increasingly contributing more to Motorola's revenue in India.

"India is not just a low cost smartphone model market. Motorola's global numbers show a contribution of roughly about 35 per cent from premium franchises such as Edge and Razor for India and the APAC region. Overall also, we are seeing about a 50 percent contribution of revenue from premium portfolio. We are not just growing in terms of volumes, but also able to increase the average selling price of the ASP of the products. That's a very, very positive sign for us.

In India, beside the Motorola Moto G series, the premium Edge and Razr are doing pretty good. Also, the company has set up a dedicated R&D centre in Bengaluru housing hundreds of engineers to work on multiple aspects of the software as well as the hardware based on India.

Motorola Edge 60 Pro series.

In fact, this on that, which is voice activated AI assistant feature, was developed and tested by our product team and the R&D team in Bengaluru. Similarly, there are tons of features. We also have a global R&D presence. In fact, Chicago, which is our head of operations and Design has have 321 labs. We also have R&D centres distributed across the world, and India happens to a major one for us, where we're seeing a lot of development in the recent past," Ranjan noted.

Motorola also has a dedicated photography lab in Bengaluru to develop region-specific tuning for the camera for Indian skin tones, Indian hues, Indian backgrounds, and Indian surroundings.

Motorola moto AI 2.0 features on Edge 60 Pro.

"We've seen tremendous jump in terms of our camera quality acceptance. We've gone from a rating which used to be, say, four or less than four to now about a 4.4, 4.5 rating from consumers consistently for our cameras," noted Ranjan.

Recently, Motorola forayed in to new segments-- tablet and laptop-- with Moto Pad 60 Pro and the MotoBook 60 series. They come with lot of India-specific features and also optimised to work seamlessly with Android phone and even better with Motorola products. They boasts of Smart Connect to pair with compatible devices with less hassle.

Currently, Flipkart uses the Motorola branding license to sell smart TVs in India. Both the devices have received good reception in India. However, Motorola has some control over product quality, and marketing aspects of the product.

Motorola Edge 60 Pro supports Google Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot and Perplexity AI features.

"We have a very, very stringent policy where our R&D engineers, our procurement staff, everybody is involved, right, from the word go in terms of designing the product to ensure that the parts, the materials are of the relevant quality, everything passes through a very stringent quality check from our engineers," said Ranjan.

"Even the campaigns, the marketing material, everything as to be aligned and get approved from Motorola, only then a product, a campaign goes live for these products. So we are very closely working with Flipkart on this product," noted Ranjan.

"While it is not something that we are owning end to end from a quality perspective, from from a consumer benefit perspective, from a feature perspective, there are significant decisions that lie with Motola and we definitely ensure that the quality that we are giving to the end consumers stands true to the Motorola standards," said Ranjan.

Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing at Motorola - Asia Pacific.

On asked about Motorola's plans to bring a fully-owned smart TV, Ranjan said the company is still evaluating about it.

Currently, Motorola has more than 40 experience zones and 350 retail outlets across India. Also, it has 24x7 helpline in addition to pick up and drop aftersale service for premium Edge and Razr series phones.

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