Have great faith in our design, software and engg prowess to face competition: Asus

Asus launched the ZenFone Zoom  towards the end of January, almost a year after it was first announced at CES 2015. The Asus Zenfone Zoom comes with 3x optical zoom which is placed in a special housing which ensures that the phone retains its slim form factor.

The phone launch saw a lot of Asus representatives right from their CEO Jerry Shen, to their design team to the South Asia and India regional head Peter Chang. We had a chance to have an interaction with the team about the philosophy behind building Zenfone Zoom, Asus India’s future plans and more. Here are the responses from the Jerry Shen, CEO of Asus, followed by Peter Chang, South Asia and India regional head of Asus.

Is there a reason for the delay between the Zenfone Zoom announcement (CES last year) and the launch of the phone one year later?

I think the main concern was RF persistence. There were many issues we faced when we were getting together all the camera features within this slim form factor. Actually, if you look at the Hoya lens arrangement, it is not an easy process because we are placing the lenses horizontally and also image processing had to be improved. Due to 3x optical zoom there is the fear of distortion, fringing, aberration and so the image processors and DSPs had to correct that and that is not very easy. Also the camera module had to be housed in a protective covering, so we used metal injected with plastic to reduce thickness and also to improve strength. Hence it took us some time to launch the phone as we wanted to fix all the issues.

Was there a particular reason to go for 3x optical zoom or were there limitations preventing you from going more than 3x?

Actually our main aim was to build a smartphone so we knew that keeping it slim with optical zoom would be a challenge. We worked with a lot of vendors, but we found Hoya to be the best and they could fulfill our requirements. We did not want to design a camera with high optical zoom and then give it smartphone functions, hence we decided to stick to 3x optical zoom.

How different is Indian market as compared to other markets that you sell in?

I think India and China are two important markets and the toughest one is the Chinese market and the second toughest would be the Indian one. But thankfully we are doing very well here. For me, the most important thing is empowering people by making good smartphones available to them. We want to provide a perfect user experience for everyone to enjoy. And for that, the price must be attractive. We are ranked no.4 globally, excluding the Chinese players.

What will be the product category you will be focussing on?

Going forward we will be concentrating on four categories - PC or productivity category, mobile devices or connectivity category, internet of things (IoT) and robotics. For India, we will look at PC and mobile devices category for now, but maybe in the next 5 years we will also focus on IoT and Robotics in India.

How do you view competition in Indian markets?

Competition is definitely tough, but I have great faith in our design, software and engineering capabilities. We have our own in house teams, which enables us to provide a more well rounded user experience to our users than many other Chinese brands. We have proved this in almost all the countries, except China. I think we will continue to focus on our strengths and hire more talented resources to provide users with a good device across price segments.

Do you have an R&D team working in India?

We have Indians working out of our R&D centre in Taiwan. In Taiwan we have our Da Vinci labs where we hire top engineers and a lot of them are from India, some are from IITs.

Any plans to make your own applications processor? Or will you continue partnering with Intel, Qualcomm and MediaTek.

I think for the moment we will continue to partner with Intel, Qualcomm and MediaTek. But for some specific tasks such as signal processing for cameras - for such kind of dedicated work we will develop our own chips. So say in the future, if we have dual camera system or VR and AR functionalities, we can develop chips to handle the image processing on those phones - rather than have the main applications processor do the work.

Peter Chang, Regional head - South Asia and country manager

Is Asus’ ‘Make in India’ initiative limited to phones or will we see other Asus products also being made here such as laptops and tablets?

See right now we are doing the local manufacturing with our partner. So initially we will be focussing only on smartphones. There are no plans for making other products yet. Our partner needs to support the manufacturing of other products as well. But right now we want to concentrate on making mobile phones. And maybe one day when the Make in India project becomes even more successful, then at that time we will re-evaluate our stand.

Does Make In India give you a major price advantage as opposed to just importing products from your overseas plants?

Since this is the initial stage, it also involves a lot of investments from Asus, so the price advantage that we get is really not that great. At this moment, it is all about coming early to the market, so that gives us an edge. But in the future yes, if we can scale well, we will get some cost advantage.

Lot of Zenfones come with ZenUI which come with a lot of bloatware - any way to avoid that?

Yes, we have been getting a lot of feedback about that. We will ensure that you are able to delete apps that you don’t require.

Will it just be a battle of prices or will there be more about adding innovative features? Will low pricing sustain itself in the future?

Of course the smartphone market will diversify. There will be some smartphone makers who will only play the pricing battle. But this will not be our main direction. We want to jump out of this price competition and want to give people a perceived value, so that people are willing to spend more for a unique user experience. For us the key is that the user should feel good about the device.    

Do you have plans to make apps which deliver video content? Any plans to partner with video content developers to have an app within the ZenUI?

Right now we are working on this project to figure out what are the most popular apps in India. We will do a survey of the top 100 apps. Then maybe on our device have an app or a link which will let you know which are these top apps which you can download. So users can choose the apps they want one-by-one, instead of doing it manually every they log on to the Play store. As for video content delivery, there are no such plans at the moment.