Jia Yueting, founder and CEO of LeTV Holdings Co. Ltd., introduces the company's Superphone in April 2015. (Photo : www.scmp.com)
LeTV is set to make a gradual introduction of all its products that include smartphones, TVs and cloud computing to the Indian market in the first half of 2016, Jia Yueting, founder and CEO of LeTV Holdings Co. Ltd., announced during a product launch on Tuesday, Oct. 27.
Jia made the announcement during the launch of a 120-inch TV priced at 499,900 yuan ($78,634) and a low-end smartphone for young buyers that costs 1,000-1,500 yuan.
The China Daily reported that the plan is part of the company's core strategies for globalization, in which India and the United States are the first targets.
"Our theory is to create a localized business ecosystem, a new blue sea market, rather than simply rush into a competitive market," Jia added.
One of the company's subsidiaries, LeTV Sports, announced in September that it had won a three-year contract to broadcast the 2016/2017 season of the English Premier League in Hong Kong.
The report said that the $400 million deal is believed to be the company's first step in its "go global" plan.
Mo Cuitian, LeTV's vice president and Asia Pacific executive president, said that the company is making all efforts to prepare for its product launch in India.
"We are not excluding the possibility that assembly lines and R&D department will be built in India in the near future," Mo said. "We'll bring our innovative business models, including sales model such as customer planning to customer (CP2C), to the Indian market."
"For localized content building, such as Web-casting cricket, we will possibly find local partners to jointly provide our services to Indian sports fans," Mo added.
At present, LeTV has 600 content delivery network nodes around the world, including 10T bandwidth supported by LeTV Cloud, to cater to soccer fans' demand for timely and smooth Web-casting.
The company is planning to establish another 200 nodes in India and open cloud platform, user interface design as well as mobile application design to users and developers in India, Jia said.
According to global research firm TrendForce, global shipments of smartphones increased 9.1 percent quarter-on-quarter to 332 million units in the third quarter of the year.
The report said that Southeast Asia and India are the emerging markets where the major battlegrounds for vendors will occur as developed markets become saturated.
A recent report from International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research organization, showed that smartphone shipments to India in the second quarter of 2015 climbed 44 percent to 26.5 million units, from 18.4 million for the same period a year ago.
In August, Xiaomi Corp. said that Taiwan contract manufacturer Foxconn has agreed to assemble its handsets in India. Based on the agreement, the two companies will spend $5 billion on factories and research and development in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
Chinese phone maker OnePlus also announced that it had signed an agreement with Foxconn to manufacture phones in India.
Following that, Vivo released a statement which said that it would be the title sponsor for the Indian Premier League, the most watched sports event in India, for the next two seasons.
