Spice announces partnership with Huawei to sell co-branded phones

Spice will bring 7 to 10 co-branded phones by March under Spice-Huawei brand.

Spice Mobile has announced a tie-up with Huawei under which it would sell select Android smartphones of the Chinese handset maker in India under a co-branded Spice-Huawei brand.

The first phone to be launched under this brand is the S Huawei Ascend Y100, which is priced at Rs 5,990. It comes with Android 2.3, 2.8 inch capacitive touch display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, 512 MB ROM, 256 MB RAM and a 1,050 mAh battery with 5 hours of talktime and 300 hours of standby time. In terms of connectivity phone has 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth and micro USB.

Spice has tied up with Airtel in Delhi and Mumbai, Aircel in Hyderabad and Bangalore, and Docomo in Jaipur to offer free 3G subscription for three months.

Spice has said that it will bring up to 10 handsets under this new brand in next few months. While Huawei will continue to have its own retail presence in India, some of its phones will be exclusively sold under this co-brand. Spice will market, distribute and retail these phones via its chain of Hotspot retail stores and Saholic online store.

The company has said that it plans sell 10 million phones that includes its own brand phones and 1 million units of the co-branded phones from its domestic and international handset business. Spice also owns the Nexian brand in South East Asia.

Spice Group chairman, Dr BK Modi, said, "the partnership is in very initial stages and does not include any equity or brand loyalty. The partnership could eventually lead to joint development and even manufacturing smartphones, though the two sides are still chalking out the details."

Spice which started selling smartphones close to two years ago has now decided to stop doing that will only develop and sell its own 2G and WiFi smartphones as well as feature phones, while 3G Android smartphones will come from Huawei.