To give you some background, at large, iQOO’s focus has been to offer premium flagship smartphones at affordable prices to its users. And thus far, it has managed to live up to its promise with a lineup that currently includes five smartphones, with new ones expected to come out soon. Considering the company’s run in China, where it is one of the bigger premium smartphone players with a focus on performance, it would be worth looking out for its run in other markets when it makes an announcement in India, which also marks its international announcement as a separate brand. The report suggests the unveiling of iQOO as a separate brand in India will happen sometime in March this year. Although it suggests that there is not much information known about the company’s strategy and the device that will make its debut as the first smartphone under iQOO being a separate entity, as of now, we can expect to see the device running on Snapdragon 8xx-series chipset. Besides, we are still months away from the official announcement, so it would not be until the next few weeks or probably a month, that we get to know about the devices that will mark the company’s advent as a separate brand. This follows another report which mentioned Vivo’s plans to go completely offline-based in India as part of its 2020 strategy. That means we can’t expect new phones under the Vivo U and Vivo Z-series which were online-only devices. We can hence expect iQOO to be online-specific (at least initially) in India and thereby Vivo can continue to keep its precious offline retailers happy. With the current ongoing trend among various smartphone brands spinning off their sub-brand into a separate brand in themselves, which would have its own dedicated team and would work as a separate entity, it is the end consumer who will get to pick the right smartphone for their requirements from an even bigger pool of devices. Not to mention, the brands, which have a lot of responsibilities and expectations on their shoulders to stay consistent with their offerings (as they did so far), while also growing as a separate entity.
