HonorTech to relaunch Honor brand of phones, to invest Rs 1,000 cr

HonorTech will relaunch the Honor brand of smartphones in the country in September with plans to initially invest Rs 1,000 crore in the business, a senior company official said.

For the relaunch, HonorTech is going to work under a licensing deal with a Chinese smart devices company Honor, in India. HonorTech CEO Madhav Sheth told PTI that the company will aim to garner 4-5 per cent market share in terms of volume by end of next year, which will translate to a revenue of Rs 10,000 crore for the company. “The government is looking at the idea that business and authority in the company should be owned and managed by Indians.

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“HonorTech is a completely Indian entity. We are going to work under a licensing deal with Honor where they will license us and we will do everything from sales to manufacturing in India. No royalty will go to Honor,” Sheth said. Honor brand was launched and owned by Chinese telecom major Huawei which sold it to another Chinese firm Shenzhen Zhixin New Information Technology in November 2020. Sheth recently quit Realme where he was steering their international business including India.

He has formed his own joint venture, HonorTech, with PSAV Global owned by entrepreneur C P Khandelwal. “Honor’s 70 per cent manufacturing is completely automatic and 40 per cent of their machinery is completely made by them. We need to match similar standards with them in India. Under the deal, Honor will help us with product know-how, entire supply chain management, technology transfers, software transfers at a defined cost,” Sheth said. He said that the company will initially get some of the Honor products to test the Indian market and plans to start manufacturing them locally by end of this year.

“We will launch Honor smartphones from next month onwards. We are in talks with electronics manufacturing services who are eligible for PLI (production-linked incentive) for manufacturing. We are targeting to start shipping “Made in India” products from November or December,” Sheth said. The company plans to raise Rs 1,000 crore in debt funding that will be invested by next year. “We are looking at revenue of Rs 10,000 crore by end of next year which translates into 4-5 per cent volume market share,” Sheth said.