Motorola to set up over 50 exclusive offline stores in India

Handset maker Motorola will set up more than 50 exclusive retail stores across metros and tier I cities this fiscal as it looks to ramp up sales in the country.

Motorola, which had re-entered the Indian market in 2014 in an exclusive partnership with e-commerce Flipkart, has been gradually increasing its offline presence to reach out to more customers.

"These stores, we call them hubs, will be set up across metros and tier I cities. These will not just be sales points but also experience points, especially for our high-end devices like Moto Z. We hope to have over 50 of these in this fiscal," Motorola Mobility India MD Sudhin Mathur told PTI.

He added that currently there are six such hubs in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai that have been set up through the franchise route.

Motorola is a part of Chinese technology giant, Lenovo.

Motorola and Lenovo get about one-third of their sales from brick-and-mortar retail stores. "All Moto Hub stores will house devices that are available exclusively online, along with Motorola accessories like on-ear and in-ear headphones, moto shells, covers," he said.

According to research firm Counterpoint, Lenovo (along with Motorola) had a 6.8 per cent market share at the end of June 2017 quarter, taking up the fifth slot of the leading smartphone players tally in India.

Samsung led the list with 24.1 per cent share, followed by Xiaomi (15.5 per cent), Vivo (12.7 per cent) and Oppo (9.6 per cent), according to Counterpoint.