Motorola Flipkart

For the first time in its history, Motorola decided to go for exclusive partnership to sell new Motorola Smartphones: Moto G, Moto E and Moto X exclusively through Flipkart’s ecommerce portal. It was a new and bold marketing strategy, which has eventually paid off. As per reports coming in, it has been revealed that in the last 5 months, ever since Flipkart.com started selling Motorola smartphones (Moto G, Moto X and Moto E), more than 1 million (10 lakh) units have been sold. A total of 17.59 million smartphones were shipped in India during the first quarter of 2014. And in that report, Motorola was no-where within the top 5 handset sellers (probably because majority of 1 million motorola phones were sold in 2nd Apr-June Quarter). Magnus Ahlqvist, corporate VP, Emea & Apac, Motorola Mobility said, “It proves that the business model that we chose was a really strong one. I don’t think we have achieved anything similar elsewhere,” Sachin Bansal, co-founder of Flipkart is sounding very optimistic as he said, “We believe these sales figures should put Motorola among the top five mobile brands in the country,”.

We will be waiting for the smartphone sales data for Q2 of 2014 to determine whether Motorola has really bounced up its way to the top 5 handset sellers list or not, but the sales data as of now definitely makes them one of the favorites in India. After witnessing such unprecedented success, Motorola has no plans to go for the traditional brick and mortar sales route to sell their handsets. When their exact targeted audience is online, and ready to order electronically, why should they even bother to go for offline route? Also, selling exclusively only that too only through one portal saves them a lot of marketing and distribution costs!

And it seems that based on Motorola’s success, other smartphone players and ecommerce portals are taking the inspiration here. Recently budget handset makers Celkon Impex launched their new series: Campus A35K smartphone exclusively on Snapdeal.com Vishal Gondal’s fitness device GoQii was also launched exclusively on Snapdeal. Recently, ultra successful Chinese handset makers Xiaomi also announced exclusive partnership with Flipkart to sell their latest smartphones in India. The trend is definitely catching on. With the huge success of Motorola smartphones with Flipkart, Indian eCommerce is now looking forward to a new level of partnerships and joint ventures.