Phicomm Passion 660: The Chinese are here with passion

It’s midway through the year, and we have our hands full with phone launches, and Chinese smartphones in particular — from Micromax and its Yureka range , to the Xiaomi Mi 4i and the Meizu M1 Note . Nonetheless, they all originate in China. Then comes along yet another. And it’s now time for yet another Chinese brand PHICOMM to set shop in India with the Passion 660 smartphone. While it may come as a surprise to many, PHICOMM is a Chinese company with a turnover exceeding RMB 10 billion or $1.5 billion. We’re sure that won’t capture your attention as much as the price of Rs 10,999. The Passion 660 is powered by a Qualcomm MSM9839 1.5 GHz octa-core processor. With a metalic design which is welcome, it boasts of a 5inch full HD IPS display capable of a resolution of 1920x1080. To exploit this display is a 13MP auto-focus camera and a 5MP front-facing camera. The interface layer that sits on top of Android 4.4.4 is Expect 5.0. We’re still wondering why it’s named Expect, though. The OS is Android 4.4.4 KitKat. Whether that works for you or not depends on your preference. For those who stay on the cutting edge, it may come across as a dampener. Since the device supports FDD-LTE and TDD-LTE bands, it also supports global roaming on LTE networks. Now you begin to sit back and notice. From initial use, the device seemed fluid, but we’d keep an eye out for the real deal. Another addition is the inclusion of various sensors to augment your obsession with outdoor activities and fitness in particular. The Passion 660 includes a G-sensor, L-sensor, P-sensor, E-compass, barometer, step-counter sensor and a gesture sensor. We’ll discover how effective these are in a detailed review. To know more about PHICOMM’s plans in India, we caught up with Zheng Min, CEO PHICOMM, and Jaffery Fan, Head of Global Sales, PHICOMM at the launch of the Passion 660. PHICOMM launched the Passion 660 on Wednesday for Rs 10,999. [caption id=“attachment_269498” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Jaffery Fan, Head of Global Sales, PHICOMM launching the Passion 660 smartphone in New Delhi on June 03, 2015.[/caption]   Could you share a bit about PHICOMM with our readers, since you’re new to India? PHICOMM was established in 2009. It’s a fairly new company that has grown very fast. In fact, it registered an annual growth rate of 200%. PHICOMM consists of 5 strategic business units. Among others, it includes mobile devices, switches and routers, smartcities, and cloud computing solutions. Effectively providing end-to-end service hardware and software platforms, research and development, design, manufacturing as well as sales and marketing teams — all in house. This has worked as a very successful model in China, and we aim to do the same in India. How strong is the fundamentals of the company? What was your revenue turnover last year? In addition to the phenomenal growth (200%) that we have achieved, PHICOMM currently stands at $1.5 billion. The mobile device space in India has become cluttered and highly competitive. What are your thoughts? Today the market is changing rapidly. There are many brands out there, and that has made the market very crowded. To stand out, what we need is unique value. We believe our in-house ecosystem model is unique. With our research and development and cloud infrastructure, design, manufacturing and data centres all in-house, we’re able to provide end-to-end solutions. What is your strategy for entering this market at this stage? Can you share the targets? We partnered with Amazon, to enter this new market, and cater to a young audience. We also will continue to focus on our offline presence with 2-3 models released by the end of the year. Over the next 5 years, it is our target to garner 5 percent of the Indian market share. What PHICOMM services do you plan to provide in the Indian market? From among the several business units at PHICOMM, we plan to introduce in India is the home devices service some time soon. How do you plan to retail in India? In addition to our partnership with Amazon India, we also plan to have an offline presence and aim to cover a major part of India, mainly major cities over the next 6-9 months. Given that Xiaomi had hinted at setting up a local manufacturing hub here in India, are you planning to set up a base in India as well? India is a very important market, and will only grow in the future. In line with this philosophy, we plan to include local R&D and manufacturing. This could either be by us directly, or via partners. We’re still talking to our partners. Are you open to outsource device manufacturing to Indian partners? We’re still talking to partners, and will decide soon. How does PHICOMM see the India smartphone market? In 3 years, India will be among the most important market in the world. Currently, smartphone penetration may be quite low, so there is definitely potential in the market. We expect a huge requirement of smartphones in the Indian market in the near future. Micromax has just been ranked as the 10th mobile brand in the world. What is your comment, and how do you see PHICOMM achieving its target? We are an international player, and given the nature of the industry, a lot of the technology implemented is global in nature as well. For instance, manufacturing is in China, software come from various countries such as the US. So we definitely have to be a global brand. And we are. To put this in context, we have a presence in Munich to cater to the European market, Singapore to cater to the South East, and we also look at Cloud Computing from our San Francisco office in the US. India will be the next country we are looking at closely. We have a local team present, but we will form a local base soon. When would the sale of the device begin? What would the model be? The PHICOMM Passion 660 would be available on Amazon.in beginning June 9th and would be open to all. We won’t have any flash sales. How many handsets do you plan to sell in India? Do you have any kind of targets for sales? Over the next year, we have a target to sell between 50,000 and 100,000 handsets. Once we have done that we plan to launch our next flagship device.