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Local smartphone player Mobicel announces pricing

Cape Town - Mobicel is taking on the South African smartphone market with an aggressive pricing strategy.

The local company launched its Air range of smartphones and tablets last week. But on Tuesday it has announced a strategy designed to gain market share, particularly among price sensitive consumers.

The most expensive device, the flagship Mobicel Air smartphone, sells for R3 499. That puts it well under the affordable device range from Samsung, Sony, HTC and LG.

Despite that, the iPhone-lookalike Air is powered by a 1.7GHz OctaCore processor, with 16GB of memory on board and 1GB of RAM.

Its main camera is rated at 8 megapixels, with a 5 megapixel front facing unit.

The company is aggressively driving the lower cost smartphone market.

Smartphone battleground

"We endeavour to continuously introduce more feature packed devices to the market at affordable prices. Most of the big brands have moved away from the sub R2 000 market - we plan to increase our range in this space and robustly fill this large gap," founder Ridhwan Khan told Fin24.

Mobicel also offers a mid-range device dubbed the 'Scarlett', which is a dual SIM phablet with a 1.3GHz dual core processor that costs R1 999. Mobicel's cheapest offering is the Matrix at just R899.

The Air has a screen size of 12.1cm (4.8 inch) and that goes down to 10cm on the Matrix and the Scarlett comes in at 15.2cm, standard for the format.

Developing markets such as SA are a new battleground as manufacturers race for market share while sales in North America and Europe slow.

"Mature markets face limited growth potential as the markets are saturated with smartphone sales, leaving little room for growth with declining feature phone market and a longer replacement cycle," said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Companies such as Huawei, Lenovo and Hisense have realised that cost is a major factor and market smartphones in SA directly at people who value affordability.

Mobicel rejected criticism that it offers poor customer service because its handsets are cheaper than main rivals.

"We live and breathe our motto 'You Deserve Better' and make a conscious effort to ensure our brand offers this. We are embarking on an extensive campaign that will offer aspirational products to our consumers and have aligned our product line to cater for all market segments," said Khan.

Part of that drive is a distribution agreement with The Foschini Group, as well as operators MTN and Cell C.

What do you think of the Mobicel range? Let us know.

- Follow Duncan on Twitter

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