“I'm tasked with getting local insights”: Sumit Walia, OPPO India

An interview with the first Indian CMO of the Chinese smartphone brand

From putting quality checks on refrigerators at Videocon’s factories in 2001, to being the first Indian to lead Chinese smartphone brand OPPO’s marketing function, Sumit Walia has had an interesting two decades. He joined OPPO as VP, product and marketing, in July 2019 after spending close to a decade at Samsung, prior to which he worked at Tata Tele Business Services, Huawei and LG.

Before Walia was given OPPO India’s top marketing job, Will Yang, the brand’s present day South Asia CMO, handled the India ops from Gurgaon for five years. This shift in leadership is in line with the brand’s push for Indianisation. OPPO currently produces close to 50 million units annually and aims to double its capacity by 2020. With more muscle behind its local manufacturing, research and development, OPPO is keen on making India a global export hub.

OPPO is owned by Guangdong-based BBK Electronics, which also markets smartphone brands Vivo, realme and OnePlus. As per Counterpoint Research, OPPO grew 12 per cent YoY (in 2019 over 2018) and held the fifth position, with eight per cent market share in Q3 of 2019, after rival brands Xiaomi (26 per cent), Samsung (20 per cent), Vivo (17 per cent) and realme (16 per cent). OPPO’s annual growth was fuelled by demand for its budget segment device A5s and the F11 series.

The brand is currently undergoing a premiumisation exercise. With the launch of the Reno series of premium smartphones (priced between `24,000 and `50,000), OPPO is venturing into OnePlus’ territory. The brand’s premium makeover is not limited to models and will extend to facets like distribution and retail.

The brand team has worked with agencies like Contract India and Ogilvy in the recent past; however, there’s no creative agency on-record at the moment. Recently, the media business went to Dentsu Aegis Network.

On the media front, OPPO has been active across mediums and has also maintained big-ticket partnerships like the title sponsorship for Sunburn Music Festival and its partnership with the International Cricket Council (till September 2023). It also has its regional partnerships, for example, Straight Up Punjab, a Punjabi concert live-streamed digitally on YouTube globally.

In a quick chat with afaqs!Reporter, Walia gives us a peek into the brand’s ‘Make in India’ push, ‘premiumisation’ plan and more.

Edited excerpts.

"We operate as an independent and individual entity in India; there is no coordination among any of these brands": Sumit Walia

"The app ecosystem, hardware and data are crossbreeding": Sumit Walia

"We look at holistic experiences: presales, point of sale - we have 60,000 sales touchpoints - and after sale - our service centres are adept at repairing phones within an hour": Sumit Walia

Also Read: "All the media we've done is one big experiment": Vikas Agarwal, OnePlus

(This story was first published in our magazine afaqs! Reporter on January 1, 2020.)

Editor's note:

Over a year ago, while mentoring a reporter, I was faced with a simple yet potent question, driven by his curiosity: When sibling advertising agencies Ogilvy and Grey compete for the same business, how does parent company WPP deal with the competitive dynamics internally? Replace these three names with any other parent-and-baby company combination and the fundamental question stays the same.

This question came up again in a different context – the world of smartphone marketing – when, few days back, the same inquisitive reporter met with Sumit Walia, the recently appointed product and marketing chief of Oppo. Owned by Guangzhou based BBK Electronics, Oppo is rivaled by siblings Vivo, realme and OnePlus, in India. Though all four brands from the Bu Bu Gao family fiercely compete with one another for market share and vie for the same consumers' precious attention, they operate as independent units. An average smartphone buyer may not even be aware of their shared lineage... many of my colleagues didn't.

Despite the overlap in target groups, each brand appears to be striving for more than just media muscle and visibility. In an effort to differentiate themselves from one another, smartphone brands are now looking for niches within the category. And this reflects the way people use their phones today – there are gamers, instagram addicts, webseries bingers, tech geeks... each type has unique needs. And that's the space we at afaqs!Reporter are keen to explore.

Earlier this year, when we put OnePlus' Vikas Agarwal on the cover, we learnt about the brand's quirky, experimental and elitist attitude towards advertising. Before that, Madhav Sheth of realme went on record with us saying he sees little merit in “fancy” marketing. By then Vivo had appointed Aamir Khan as endorser. Where does Oppo stand? How does Sumit split the marketing pie – and what sub-segment within the cluttered, hyper-competitive, clone-prone smartphone segment does he want his brand to own?

Ashwini Gangal, Executive Editor