PhotoFast, a premium smart accessory company based in Taiwan, has started its penetration in Indian market. The brand is well known for offering quality products for Apple devices. PhotoFast’s storage solutions and mobile accessories have been praised by key industry influencers for their innovation, design and convenience. Company has chalked out very aggressive plans for Indian market as the consumer base of Apple has been soaring since last few years. Altaf Ansari, Regional Business Manager, PhotoFast for Indian market is ready to enhance market presence with exciting plans in Year 2018.
DT: What have been the crucial milestones of your company during year 2017?
Mr. Altaf: The year 2017 has been extremely important for us as this is the year when PhotoFast has taken an important step by entering the Indian market directly. Earlier the PhotoFast products that were sold in India were through the distributor and there was no PhotoFast representative in India. Besides in 2018, we will have a full range of products as compared to very few models earlier.
DT: What were the major challenges for your company? How do you fought those challenges?
Mr. Altaf: The major challenge for us was brand awareness. We are trying to overcome this by reaching out to the consumers and channel through PR, social media, print media, product reviews and launches etc.
DT: How GST changed your business affair in year 2017?
Mr. Altaf: GST has been a big game changer for the industry. Initially the business took a massive hit but as the time is passing by, there is a hope for revival of business gradually. We had worked with our distributors very closely to ensure smooth transition in to the new tax regime by carefully monitoring and implementing the guidelines which was not a very easy task.
DT: What's your channel strength currently in India? How do you plan to boost channel strength in year 2018?
Mr. Altaf: Currently the channel is quite ad hoc and unmanaged as earlier, there was no one from PhotoFast to streamline and develop the channel India. In 2018, we are extremely keen on and are going to put all efforts in developing both the offline &online channels in India. Our target is to appoint at least one sub-distributor in each state in 2018 who has a strong channel partner eco-system under him. We will be supporting and doing business through our channel partners only.
DT: How do you assure your customer excellent service support?
Mr. Altaf: We consider Customer service as our primary responsibility and lay a lot of emphasis on providing excellent service to them. We have a very simple yet very effective service model wherein the customer gets a replacement of completely new unit against the faulty unit from the place of purchase. We wish to continue with this same model.
DT: Please share your current revenue and market growth rate. What is target for year 2018?
Mr. Altaf: The mobile accessories market is said to reach a whopping $3545Mn by the end of year 2026 in India according to one study done recently. The factors fueling this growth are the active adoption of smartphones in India and the rapid growth in the internet connectivity speeds which are increasingly getting cheaper and affordable by the consumers in India. The fact that Apple India has doubled its sales revenue compared to last year proves that not only are the entry level phones are gaining momentum but also the high end phones’ adoption is growing quite well. All these factors are eventually leading to the fact that the amount of data downloaded on the phones is huge and soon run out the internal storage capacity of the phones. This is where we come in to the picture. We offer innovative and premium quality storage solutions to mobile users with lots of important and easy to use functionalities which is not offered by most of the brands. We are planning to do close to $1mn in 2018 in India.
