Gionee Confirms Their Make In India Commitment; Partners With Foxconn and Dixon To Kickstart Local Production

By Mohul Ghosh Last updated Sep 11, 2015

Gionee has officially announced their foray into the red hot ‘Make in India’ vision. Gionee now joins other Chinese phone makers : Lenovo, Oppo, Xiaomi, Phicomm and Huawei to kickstart domestic manufacturing of their handsets.

As per reports coming in, Gionee has teamed up with Foxconn to manufacture smartphones from their Sri City plant located at the border of TN and AP. It is the same location where Foxconn is manufacturing Xiaomi and Lenovo’s products as well; and these three Chinese firms are cut throat competitors!

Besides Foxconn, Gionee has also partnered with Dixon to assemble smartphones and feature phones.

Dixon is Noida based Electronics Manufacturing Services firm and the operations will start from October this year. Dixon can produce 7 lakh devices every month, while Foxconn can deliver 5 lakh monthly devices. Gionee will also hire 15-20 engineers per assembly line in these two locations.

As per initial reports, Gionee will start local manufacturing with their “P” and “M” models, which are their entry to mid-range series of smartphones along with feature phones.

As per Aravind Vohra, country CEO and managing director of Gionee India, local manufacturing will help them to introduce their new models faster, and to bring down the cost as well. Gionee will assemble the semi-knocked down units, which will save them higher import duties which would be effective from 2016.

In April this year, we had reported that Gionee will start local manufacturing, but no concrete dates were mentioned. This fiscal year (2014-15), Gionee has grown 450% in terms of revenues. IN 2013-14, they had revenues of Rs 500 crore, which has increased to Rs 2750 crore in 2014-15 fiscal year.

For 2015-16, they are targeting revenues of Rs 6000 crore and total sales of 6 million devices. Rs 225 crore has been allocated for marketing.

Besides initiating domestic production, Gionee will also actively start pushing for online sales in India and globally. Till now, Gionee had avoided the ecommerce route, as they firmly believed in the traditional, brick-and-mortar model for selling their products. Talks are on with Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal to launch exclusive models, and the official announcement will be made in October.

Gionee’s president William Lu has also said that this manufacturing and assembling their phones in India will make it easy for them to expand in other SAARC countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal & Sri Lanka; as India will act as their hub outside China.

All major Make in India investments Announcements till date: