India's smartphone market is highly dense and competitive, making market penetration and sustainability a marathon task. On Thursday, Acer seized a golden opportunity to reintroduce its smartphone brand in India through a licensing agreement with Bengaluru-based startup Indkal Technologies. This move follows Indkalโs successful raise of $36 million in an A-Series funding round last month, led by Mauritius-based Aries Opportunity Funds.
Under the agreement, Indkal will be designing, manufacturing, and distributing Acer-branded smartphones in India. The brand is planning to launch an extensive range of smartphones spanning from โน15,000-50,000. The brand has selected the mid-range segment to introduce its options, which is already dominated by leading brands like Vivo, Oppo, Tecno, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Samsung. Acer will be straight into the competition with these giants of mid-range smartphone brands.
The smartphones will be assembled in India and aligned with advanced software technologies. The reports doing rounds suggest that Indkal is setting up the target of manufacturing one million handsets every year in line with the smartphone PLI (production-linked incentive) scheme.
Anand Dubey, CEO of Indkal Technologies has shown confidence in his production unit and hopes these well-designed smartphones will combine the exceptional value of advanced hardware and software, and will be appreciated by the consumers.
Notably, this is the second partnership between the Indian startup and Taiwanese tech giant after the tie-up for Acer-branded smart TVs in 2021 in India.
First, Acer, a Taiwanese consumer electronics firm entered the Indian smartphone market primarily around 2011-12 and introduced innovative models under their Liquid series, aiming to mark its presence in the competitive Indian smartphone market. However, it could not achieve the expected success, hence rolled in from India and paid more attention to its core business of laptops, computers, and peripherals. Now Acer has relaunched its brand and hopes to reach traction. However, the brand has to deal with tough competition with market giants.
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