Taiwanese handset manufacture, Asus has joined hands with Foxconn to manufacture smartphones in India. The company is setting up a manufacturing unit in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, to expand its reach in India. Initially Asus will manufacture Zenfone 2 Laser which will soon be followed by ZenFone Go and aims to manufacture 1.5 lakh smartphones on a monthly basis which will account for almost 80 per cent of its sales in India.
Asus is not the first to initiate smartphone manufacturing in India; other smartphone makers like Xiaomi, Motorola/Lenovo, Karbonn, Celkon and Gionee have already announced their plans to manufacture smartphones in India.
Announcing this, Peter Chang, regional head – South Asia & country manager – system business group – Asus India, said, “India offers us a huge opportunity as smartphone penetration is just 10 per cent. We are excited to announce our local manufacturing facility that will cater to the growing demands of the market. The Indian government’s focus on ‘Make in India’ has opened a plethora of opportunities for international companies. It is an opportune time to make the announcement as it will enable us to bring our cutting EDGE products to consumers who are looking for features and design sensibilities of a high-end smartphone at an economic price.”
Peter Chang further added, “We are aggressively targeting the Indian market. We aim to achieve 5 per cent market share in the country by next year and empower all our customers with luxury.”
The Asus Zenfone 2 Laser features HD (1280 x 720-pixel) display with with Anti-Scratch Corning Gorilla Glass 4 coating. It is powered with 1.2 GHz quad-core processor along with 2 GB of RAM and runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system. The Zenfone 2 Laser offers 16 GB of internal storage which is further expandable to up-to 128 GB via a micro SD card and backed by 3000 mAh battery.
It sports a 13-megapixel laser-assisted auto-focus rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera. On the connectivity front, Zenfone 2 Laser offer 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, Micro USB 2.0, and GPS with AGPS. The handset measures 152.5 x 77.2 x 10.8 mm and weighs 180 grams.
On the other hand, ZenFone Go features 5-inch HD ( 1280×720 pixel) IPS display with anti-fingerprint coating. It is powered by 1.3 GHz quad-core mediatek MT6580 processor along with 2GB of RAM and runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system. The Zenfone go offers 16 GB of internal storage which is further expandable to up-to 64 GB via a micro SD card and backed by 2070 mAh battery.
It sports a 8-megapixel auto-focus rear camera and a 2-megapixel front camera. On the connectivity front, Zenfone 2 Laser offer 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, Micro USB 2.0, and GPS with AGPS. The handset measures 144.5 x 71 x 9.98 mm and weighs 135 grams.