Motorola, in a move to strengthen its offline presence in the country has announced its partnership with Sangeetha Mobiles, the multi-brand retail chain . Sangeetha Mobiles has more than 475 retail stores spread across seven states, and all these stores will be set up with Moto Hub offline stores. As part of the partnership, Motorola today inaugurated the first-ever Moto Hub at a Sangeetha store in Bangalore. For the unaware, Moto Hub is the Lenovo-owned company's exclusive offline stores where it will be selling all of its smartphones.
Motorola has been opening Moto Hub stores across the country since the start of this year. So far, Motorola has announced 600+ Moto Hub stores across the states of Delhi NCR, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Odisha and West Bengal & North East. The Lenovo-owned company is planning to open 1000+ Moto Hubs by the end of this year.
Speaking about today's partnership with Sangeetha Mobiles, the company will set up Moto Hubs in over 475 Sangeetha Mobile stores across seven states including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.
Since the start of 2018, Motorola has been opening Moto Hub stores in the country to bolster its retail presence because still, 60% of smartphone sales are coming from the offline market itself. The current smartphone leader Xiaomi also started expanding offline presence with the Mi Home range of exclusive Xiaomi stores and through Mi Preferred Partner program.
Since its entry back in 2014, Motorola has been largely known as an online-only brand, but that's slowly changing. Also, the expansion into the offline market will help the company regain its lost market share. Motorola, as per the data released by various tracking firms is no more amongst the top five smartphone brands in India. However, the company is not yet done with the Indian market as it started teasing the Moto G6 range of smartphones as launching soon.
Motorola is expected to launch the Moto G6 and Moto G6 Play smartphones in the coming days. It will be interesting to see how Motorola price both these devices in the hyper-competitive Indian smartphone market.
