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Local brand names help sell cheap Chinese phones
Chinese-made mobile phone handsets with Vietnamese brand names have overcome consumer doubts about poor quality and gained a toehold on the lower end of the domestic market – with the past two years witnessing the appearance of affordable mobile phones with such brands as Hanel, Q-Mobile, F-mobile, WellcoM and MobiStar.
Appealing to a low-end market segment, these brands still had enormous potential to develop, said CMC Distribution Marketing Director Ho Quoc Hue.
CMC also put its Blue Phone mobile phone onto the market early this year with the ambition to become a leading Vietnamese mobile phone brand in the future.
"Customers are now willing to use made-in-Viet Nam mobile phones if they are offered at reasonable prices and have good quality," Hue said.
The successful debuts of new mobile phone brands had demonstrated the increasing efforts of domestic companies to better meet domestic demand, said An Binh Telecommunication (ABTel) Director Nguyen Quang Minh.
Q-Mobile, developed by ABTel last year, already accounts for about 20 per cent of all mobile phones sold on the domestic market, ranking second in terms of the domestic market share behind market leader Nokia, Minh asserted.
"We target to surpass Nokia and acquire 50 per cent of domestic market share by year's end," he said.
Although a sales success, many of these Vietnamese brands continue to have a bad reputation with the public, which view the handsets as having "Vietnamese covers and Chinese hearts". Many of the phones are indeed Chinese imports bearing a Vietnamese brand.
But Minh doesn't see this as a problem, arguing that many foreign companies with famous brand names only focused on research and development or design, while outsourcing production to other partners, Minh said. CMC admits that it does not manufacture Blue Phone models in Viet Nam but outsources production to China. However, Minh said proprietary technology and trademark development often accounted for 80 per cent of a product's value, while production accounted for just 20 per cent.
"A completed mobile phone requires many components and we cannot produce them all by ourselves," said Hue. "The most important is that you choose the right producers to ensure the quality of your products."
What we were striving for was that Vietnamese-branded mobile phones would became so cheap that even the taxi motorbike driver could afford one, said a representative from another Vietnamese mobile brand.
Vietnamese mobile phones could offer major price advantages, while offering applications similar to more expensive smartphones which allowed people to play games or read newspapers online, he said.
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