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Wicked Leak Aims To Sell Tablets At Lowest Price
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The firm is refraining from investments in advertising to maintain costs; it is depending on word of mouth publicity as of now.
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Thursday, July 05, 2012:
Wicked Leak Inc was founded in 2009 and since then the company has launched a series of products including tablets, smartphones, laptops and many more gadgets, Wammy Plus tablet being the latest to join the bandwagon. The firm has its online portal – www.wickedleak.org, through which it sells its devices with an aim to provide latest gadgets to consumers at the lowest possible prices. EFYTimes spoke to Aditya Mehta, founder and CEO, Wicked Leak Inc, about its business and upcoming products in the Indian market.
Is the website Wicked Leak meant just for selling in-house brands and not any other brand?
The whole idea of selling our products through our website is that we do not want to get into reselling our products to the retailers and shopkeepers because that would ultimately raise the cost. With the launch of 3G, we can vertically integrate the whole system and keep very low costs for the final consumer.
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What is your distribution channel? Do you have distributors across India?
We do not have distributors because we want to give the best price and the best quality to our customers. In such a case, we can control the quality but having distributors will certainly increase the cost to some extent. So, this is the reason why we sell our products directly to the customers through our website. Also, we are working on a few tie-ups with the courier companies for distribution of our products. Consumers can directly drop the product back to us till the time it is under the warranty period.
Are you planning to come up with a Wicked Leak physical outlet?
We have just started our business in India and one needs a fixed cost to set up a new outlet. As of now, it doesn't make sense as we are concentrating on keeping a very competitive price for our products. Therefore, we cannot spend much to open up a store right now. We are doing this in order to enhance the structure for 3G and Internet penetration in the country. We are also getting into content development so that people learn and for all this, we have to ensure low costs.
There was no buzz about the launch of Wammy 7, so how exactly do you plan to stay in the competition?
We are planning an advertising strategy, but as of now, we are doing pretty well through word of mouth publicity. Right now, around 80 per cent customers on our websites come through word of mouth publicity and once they see the product and experience it, they recommend it to their friends. We have our Facebook and Twitter pages too where people visit our communities, ask questions and interact with us.
Right now, we have a revenue of Rs 8 lakh per month that will be turning into more than Rs 1.2 crore by the end of this year. As we increase the revenue, our fixed costs will go down. Also, we are mostly going to opt for online advertising, but right now we are just evaluating offline activities.
What makes you think consumers will opt for the Wammy tablet instead of other low-end tablets in the market?
We are focusing on keeping the prices low as it is the USP of our product. We can't sell the same tablet for Rs 7,000 as there is no point in customer financing our advertising costs. So the brand will eventually take care of it as long as the fundamentals of marketing are in place. We primarily focus on quality, price and distribution. Low-cost promotion will take care of it because we believe that if the product and its pricing is good and the value to customers' money is given, they will surely recommend it to their friends and family. People have had a very bad experience with Daksha and Aakash tablets and a customer's experience with a product is very important. We will work on branding or massive advertising only when we increase the size of our organisation and have an extra elbow room.
How has the response been to Wammy 7 tablets?
So far we have shipped around 700 units of Wammy 7 tablet across India and we haven't received a single complaint. Another player like Micromax has purely Wi-Fi devices and when it offers 3G data card, there is a wire running through it, which you have to hold. Secondly, Micromax works only with Tata Photon data card for which users have to pay an extra Rs 1,500. Although it comes free with the tablet, acceleration and data charges add up to the cost.
As for Wammy 7 and our other tablets, they work with more than 50 data cards. We give options to consumers to choose between 15 dongles and they are not stuck with just one option. There are subtle differences between our products and products from other players, but they do make a difference and you notice these things within two to three months.
What is your market share in the tablet segment in India?
As of now, the market for tablets in India is at a very initial stage. Around 1 lakh tablets across all brands were sold last year. With respect to the low cost devices, the units sold were lesser. Although there was so much buzz about the tablet Aakash, Aakash did not perform well as only a few devices reached the users. We have sold around 5,000 tablets, including the U-Pad and the W-Pad. In 2012, our market share is around three per cent. On the growth front, we see around 15 to 20 per cent of the market share in the next two to three years. Our firm is growing and we are already making profits and financing ourself as per the demand. As we consolidate our position, we will look forward to bringing prices down further. Wicked Leak plans to sell the Wammy tablet below Rs 4,000 as opposed to the current Rs 5,250. We want to drive the penetration in our country and that would be very beneficial as it will enable more education and more access to information.
Do you provide any service support to your customers?
Tablet market is very latent at this point as people don't have sufficient knowledge about the device and its usage. But our firm has a chat support where customer care people help out customers with their problems regarding the product. We do not leave the customers on their own after they have bought the product.
For our U-pad, we built-in a tutorial to give guidelines on how to use the tablet and how to download applications. Earlier, many people did not know how to use a tablet but wanted to own it seeing the buzz around. Tablet is new to the market just like Windows in 1990.
We at Wicked Leak also focus a lot on after-sales service to the customers. People can find solutions to their problems by just shooting a mail or calling up. Our service centre is located in Mumbai but we provide services all over India. Any customer having any issue can drop in his/her query at the DTDC outlet, a courier company. It has more than 10,000 outlets across the country. The company then contacts us and we arrange the pick-up for the faulty product. Our engineers then solve the problems or repair the device and then deliver the tablet back to the customers.
Binni Rawat, EFYTIMES News Network
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