BENGALURU: Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce firm, is due to launch its own value-for-money smartphone this Wednesday to take on established players, such as Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and others.

Called Capture+, it is produced under Flipkart’s private label Billion brand and is based on the Android operating system, Livemint reported.

Capture+ has been designed, engineered, manufactured and tested in India, so it meets Made in India criteria, and it has two versions priced at Rs 10,999 for a 32GB model and Rs 12,999 for one with 64GB capacity.

The phone is the first major initiative by Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal since he stepped down as CEO in January 2016 to take up the Chairman’s post.

He told Livemint that the launch is “very significant” for the company and that more products will be launched under the Billion brand over the next few months.

“This is a very significant event for us, given that a hi-tech product like a smartphone takes our brand to another level,” he said.

“What we have done better from our side is that we’ve tried to understand consumer needs better, we’ve tried to understand what are the features in a smartphone that they would like to see more of and what are the kind of features that they don’t use much,” he added.

By launching its own smartphone, Flipkart appears to be taking a calculated risk.

Growing adoption of smartphones in India is driving huge amounts of traffic to e-commerce marketplaces like Flipkart and owning its own device would allow it to generate profits from the category segment.

But the smartphone market is also highly competitive and there is the risk of Flipkart cannibalising sales that the company already gets from the smartphone brands on its site. However, Bansal dismissed the possibility of that happening.

Sourced from Livemint; additional content by WARC staff