About Gionee:

Gionee was a Chinese smartphone manufacturer based in Shenzhen, Guangdong. This company was founded by Mr. Liú Lìróng on 16 September 2002. According to Gartner Inc., its market share in China was 4.7% in 2012 and they had expanded their market in India, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Vietnam, Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, the Philippines and Algeria.

Gionee in Indian market:

Gionee entered in Indian market in 2013 and in just couple of years, Gionee reached to the top in the country. The company launched a wide range of phones, including the world’s slimmest phone, Elife S5.1. This phone gave a huge boost to gionee in Indian market and made its way to the top in Indian mobile market and added a value with being a slimmest phone of India.

Top of that in 2016, Gionee associated in Alia Bhatt as a brand ambassador to target the youth in India. In 2017, it had appointed Bahubali’s Prabhas as its brand ambassador. With 4.6% market share, the company was among the top players in the selfie-phones segment in 2017.

In 2015 Gionee made a huge impact by enjoying the largest market share in India amongst the leading Chinese players and started local manufacturing in India with Foxconn.

In August 2016, Gionee India introduced their plans to build a manufacturing plant in India. At the same time, Gionee introduced its first Made in India smartphone with the introduction of the F103 model.

Gionee India was sold to Karbonn Mobiles in September 2018 with license of its brand. It was the last time Gionee sold their own mobile and now Karbonn mobiles are using the name.

Gionee’s association:

Gionee was associated with BLU products company. This company is based at Miami, Florida. This company used to sell Gionee’s phone under their brand name. They used to rebrand the phone and repackage the phone which were brought from Indian and chinese Gionee manufacturing unit. The market which they use to tap in with re-branded products was north America market.

Controversies of Gionee:

In 2014, it was shown by the German media that Gionee was delivering smartphones and tablets with pre-installed malware and viruses. Researchers at Lookout, a mobile security firm that is behind the Lookout app, found a malware called DeathRing on new devices which were seal pack.

IUNI Gionee’s Sub brand:

Gionee launched a sub brand which is IUNI on 20th of November 2013. They launched 4 phones in 2 years but they all failed and finally Gionee had to shut this brand in 2016. The reason for this failure was their wrong marketing strategy.

List of brand ambassadors of Gionee For Indian market:

Virat Kohli, Alia Bhatt, Prabhas, Diljit Dosanjh, Shruti Hassan, and Dulquer Salmaan were ambassadors for the brand.

Gionee’s most famous campaign:

In 2016, Gionee introduced a campaign called “Selfiestan” which was a huge success though they didn’t had any other big campaign as such.

Awards won by Gionee:

In 2018, Gionee M7/M7 plus had won an award for ‘BUSINESS CHOICE OF THE YEAR’.

Reasons for failure of Gionee in Indian market:

One of the biggest problem with Gionee was that they were not in online market. Another major reason was that they started following the marketing path of Oppo and Vivo by started using the same strategy. They started using the same strategy of Oppo and Vivo. Oppo and Vivo used to market their own respective colours and even Gionee did the same. Oppo and Vivo started selfie camera game and then Gionee also did the same.

Gionee was also making wrong decision from 2013 and that was also confirmed by the CEO and  he said that they were making 100 million yuan per month. And the devices which they were launching in India was old and they were old hardware and same devices were launched way back in China which was another bad decision was taken by them. And also, one more major reason was not using latest technology and lack of features which made their devices poor for the market as compare to Oppo and Vivo and that’s why they started losing their market.

If we talk in terms of online market which was captured by Xiaomi and they started giving the best specifications in less price where as Gionee used to give old specifications in higher price so they started to loose on pricing.

They were not doing proper marketing and they were not able to plan proper strategy. After “Make in India”, they started manufacturing the phones in India and they tried to come back in the game but again they were losing up on the strategy and selection of market.

That means they were not able to make the proper plan and they were not able to make a proper segmentation to target the phones and they were lacking on positioning also. They lost all the differentiating factors.

2017 was the year where they lost market share and finally in September 2018 they had to sell Gionee India to Karbonn.

Reasons for failure of Gionee in global market:

First reason which we can talk was the controversy in Germany where they had launched devices which had malware and virus and bloatware. Which was the first incident where Gionee started losing up their brand name.

Second reason was old specifications and less features and high price which made Gionee out of the market.

In November 2018, it was reported that chairman Liu Lirong lost over US$ 144 million to gambling in a casino which was company’s money. Finally, on 10th December 2018, the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court accepted the bankruptcy liquidation application filed by Huaxing Bank against Gionee which destroyed the brand name and value of Gionee.

Reason for bankruptcy:

Firstly, they were having high market share but they were not able to make profits and was making losses of 100 yuan from the point they started gaining popularity. Second was the gambling loss made by the chairman of the company.

Conclusion (My views on the mistakes of Gionee):

They used their money in wrong marketing strategy which was useless and made wrong decisions. Another point on which they could have worked was getting the same models in all the market at the same point of time which could have helped them to maintain the uniqueness and market.

Another point on which they could have worked was on cost cutting and reducing little features to make profit and they could have launched a successor of the same phone with few more additional features with little more price.

And before international expansions on higher level they could have worked to get profit from the market which they were leading by taking a proper decision and making right strategy. One more thing is they didn’t try to expand their brand in the world of online marketing.

Last but not the least, we can learn from this is that as we know that the company was running out of profit by launching the sub brand at the wrong time with wrong marketing strategies which  further lead to increase in their losses can be really awful and risky for a brand or company.

Shail Vajani