SPPL CEO Archives ~ My Mobile India

What's your reaction when you are building all international brands in India? What's the inspiration behind it? Our inspiration has always been to build a world-class vision brand powered by technology, in India. A brand that can give equal competition to international brands. Indian SMART TV brands have taken the center stage within the country’s TV market, unlike our smartphone industry which has till now seen only foreign brands flourish. All of SPPL’s portfolio brands combined, make SPPL the highest-selling TV brand in the country. Indian TV brands are not only leading the way in sales figures but in quality too. For SPPL, it has always been about ensuring as much backward integration as possible while creating a good ecosystem for the same. This is solely what has allowed us to maintain our quality at the prices we offer. We do feel that SPPL has been successful in R & D, manufacturing, and technology by following this route and staying in the pursuit of building a world-class brand. What's the USP of Blaupunkt TVs when it comes to audio, picture quality, OS, and looks? With regard to Blaupunkt, we are very proud of the quality sound system we have been able to achieve for the brand, something which has now become our USP. We have seen great responses for our 4K 43 to 55 inches, our best-selling categories. The picture quality of our TVs is above 550 nits. Our Blaupunkt TVs are completely bezel-less too along with Dolby DTS technology and Version 10 Android. What's the reason that within 6-7 months, Blaupunkt TV got a 4.7 rating on Flipkart? Commonly a 4.7 rating on Flipkart means it has been rated by 6000+ people and it truly is a great rating. No other brand offers the kind of sound output we do, along with being upgraded with the latest OS and PCI quality at the prices that we do. Thus, this helped us generate much buzz and brand recall in the market. What is the pricing strategy behind your products? Our pricing strategy has always been to offer the best-in-class products and technology at a fairly affordable rate. We want to make our offerings accessible to as many people as possible. Blaupunkt technology and prices is giving direct competition to the top 2-3 selling TV brands in India, and in fact, we have more USPs to offer than some older brands do. A good sound system at this price is very difficult and we have been able to do that, which has worked out very well for Blaupunkt. How does Blaupunkt, SPPL help with customers’ anxiety about post-sale services? I will admit that before we had our licenses, we did hit many road bumps in this area but ever since we acquired the necessary licenses, there have been zero such road bumps we have faced with respect to after-sales service. We have offices in 24 cities, and 28 warehouses and offer delivery in 18000 pin codes in India. Our SLA in tier 1 and 2 cities is less than 24 hours. Our company has truly been able to achieve a vast and deep network for better customer service. How stay-at-home circumstances have pushed the demand for televisions? Explain in terms of pre and post pandemic situation? Before the pandemic ever happened, we had made certain plans to be achieved in the next 4-5 years from then. The situations that arose during the pandemic turned everything around for us. We achieve those goals within 2 years in fact. And, a major reason for this has been the work-from-home phenomenon that was induced by the pandemic. While the main form of entertainment was the screen, people moved on to larger screens to watch content. The trend of exploring new content on OTT also increased. Nowadays new movies and series are first being launched on OTT platforms, this is in turn helping us. Currently, the focus of TV software companies is on helping customers spend less time searching for content and more time watching it. How did the multiple waves of the pandemic impact your business? After the first wave, when the lockdown opened up we saw much pent-up demand by customers which resulted in a 10-year hike in sales. However, with the second wave, the scenario was much different for the wave was very hard on India. People lost their disposable income and had to spend on healthcare given the Delta variant. We saw huge degrowth in the TV industry during that time period for these reasons. Now, with time we are back on track to achieving the goals, numbers that we had set for ourselves are actualizing and as per our estimates, the LED TV market will see a 10-12% growth. Also, Read Here: German audio company Blaupunkt launches budget earphone How important is the upgradation of the devices to build up the sales in an upward trajectory format? Today TV is more about software than hardware and hence one needs to upgrade their TVs timely if they want to enjoy the latest of what TV tech has to offer. India is a very tech-savvy country. Not only is our population very young, but because of this, the rate at which India adopts technology is very fast. A software lifecycle is no more than 3-4 years. An upgrade is certainly required after that. We are seeing customers replacing their gadgets within a quicker time period because of these reasons. WRT gadgets today including TV, it is more about the software than the hardware.

SPPL CEO

Technology adoption is very fast in India, says Avneet Singh Marwah, SPPL CEO