Karbonn or Karbonn Mobiles is an Indian mobile manufacturing company. It is one of the leading handset makers in India. The company was founded in the year 2009. Apart from making mobile phones, Karbonn also manufactures tablets and mobile accessories as well. The founders of Karbonn Mobiles are Pardeep Jain and Sudhir Hasija. The headquarters are based in New Delhi, the capital city of India. Karbonn Mobiles is a joint subsidiary of Jaina Group and UTL Group.
In the year 2011, the total investment of the firm in the consumer market was almost over $5 million. Karbonn has also contracted with various semiconductor companies for the production of their smartphones as well. Karbonn Mobiles has almost over 85,000 retailers all over India. There are also about more than 1000 service centers all over India as well. As of 2014, Karbonn Mobiles had earned a turnover of about 4000 crore INR.
History Of Karbonn
In 2009, with the help of a joint venture between United Telelinks and Jaina Marketing and Associated, Karbonn Mobiles was born. United Telelinks is a Bengaluru based firm. While Jaina Marketing has its headquarters in Okhla.
Karbonn Mobiles also managed strategic ties with Sistema Shyam TeleServices Limited as well. Karbonn is not only present in India, but also in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Middle East, and Europe too.
In 2013, Karbonn Mobiles partnered up with Eros International Media, for the release of the Kochadaiyaan movie. Therefore Karbonn mobiles created 500,000 mobile phones with Kochadaiyaan branding. Karbonn Mobiles also teamed up with digital entertainment platform, Hungama, for providing digital content to its customers.
Developments In The Mobile Space
In 2012, Karbonn started manufacturing Google’s Android-powered smartphones. And in 2014, Microsoft declared Karbonn Mobiles as one of the hardware partners. This is for the manufacturing of Windows Phone operating system based smartphones. Karbonn also teamed up with Google to bring out the first set of Android One program powered smartphones.
The model was Karbonn Sparkle V. It came pre-loaded with Google’s own Android OS, without any such modifications. Also, Android One was marketed to receive faster OS and security patch updates too. Karbonn also sold their Android One powered smartphones in the UK, via Amazon UK. Karbonn was the first phone manufacturer to sell Android One powered smartphones in the UK. From the standpoint of being an Indian smartphone company, this was a great achievement.
In 2018 September, Gionee Mobiles India was sold off to Karbonn Mobiles, with all the licensing of Gionee. Based on the reports in 2014, Karbonn Mobiles was ranked 77th most trusted brand in India. This was out of a total of 1200 different types of brands. The study was conducted by Trust Research Advisory of India. But in 2017, the ranking got pushed further, and Karbonn was ranked 350th out of a total of 1000 brands. It was partly due to the immense rise of other brands like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. And partly due to the fact that Karbonn stopped innovating and releasing new smartphones, in this ultra-competitive smartphone market. During its whole lifetime, Karbonn launched about 245+ feature phones and 110+ smartphones, to the consumers.
