Alcatel Plans to Increase Offline Presence to 5,000 Stores by March

Smartphone maker Alcatel India will expand its retail network to 5,000 stores in five states by March next year as it looks to increase its market share in the country.

"We are going to expand our retail presence to increase our market share. At present we sell through around 700 stores in select states. By March we plan to sell across 1000 stores each in five states -- Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra," Alcatel India, Regional Director, Praveen Valecha said on sidelines of launch of a new smartphone.

The company launched 4G smartphone Idol 4 for Rs. 16,999 which will be sold along with JBL headphone and a pair of Virtual Reality goggles.

"This is the sixth smartphone from Alcatel launched in India. Now we will bring more models next year to expedite our strategy to capture 10 percent market share in India by 2018. We have around 2-3 percent share in online space. The offline presence will further help us achieving 3-4 percent additional share," Valecha said.

He said that the Idol 4 will help company gain traction between among youth in age bracket of 15-34.

The phone has 5.2-inch display, dual 4G SIM slot, 3GB RAM, 16GB internal memory and expandable storage support of up to 512 GB. The company is exclusively selling it on Flipkart from today.

Valecha said that the company has 400 service centres across country and it is planning to open 100 exclusive service centres in 2017-18.