Interaction with Mr Gopal Jeyaraj- Head India and SAARC for Anker

Anker innovations, a US-based Multinational Consumer electronics Brand with a strong presence across countries like Canada, Germany, UK, France, Italy, China and more. The brainchild of former Google employee – Steven Yang, Anker was founded in September 2011 with the objective of bringing consumers affordable and high-quality consumer electronics goods. Anker believes in providing people with everything, which is needed in order to be mobile.

Anker Innovations is an Umbrella brand that houses Anker, Eufy, Sound core among others, Anker is a global leader in charging technology and is America’s leading charging brand.

Recently, to know more about Anker and their plans for India, we had an email interaction with Mr Gopal Jeyaraj Head India and SAARC for Anker Innovations; we asked him a couple of questions, let’s see what are those?

 

Mr Gopal Jeyaraj-Head India and SAARC Anker Innovations
Mr Gopal Jeyaraj Head India and SAARC | Anker Innovations

Gopal Jeyaraj is the Head of India and SAARC for Anker, a company within Anker Innovations. With over 12 years of experience, Gopal has worked in varied companies like D-Link, Ingram Micro, Redington and V5 Global in various roles and experiences in the IT/Telecom Industry, which led him to develop a very active approach to his role.

He manages all operations in India including Sales and Marketing.
Gopal focuses a large amount of his time on new business development and in a span of 21 months has started an association with almost all TOP Retailers and E retailers in the country and now looking to start in Nepal, Bangladesh, Srilanka, Mongolia, Pakistan, Maldives and Kazakistan soon.

He is passionate about accessories and retail and has taken a challenge of making Anker as the most preferred brand of accessories across India.

Gopal believes in scaling to new heights of success with hard work and dedication while leaving a mark of excellence on each step. He finds reading books and listening to old Hindi film music, the best ways to relax.

1) What is the vision of Anker for India’s market?

Our Vision is to ensure quality products with innovative technology to as much as consumers in India market at affordable offerings.

2) Anker products are available in 100 countries, have you seen any difference between other countries and India, for instance in terms of technology adaption or in other verticals?

Compare to other countries, India is at much faster growth rate due to the high adaption of Smartphones, low-cost data and huge consumer base. When it comes to technology adaption – Indian consumers evolves fast and adopt any new technology that interests them.

3) Scope of playing in Accessories market in India is very competitive, what Anker is doing to compete and for expanding its footprint?

Smartphone accessories market in India is very dynamic, we as a brand currently focus on expanding our base to cover as many retail channels as possible to ensure the availability of Anker products for consumers. We focus on four major points – Our distributors, retailers, consumers and finally right offering at the right price to our consumers and we strongly believe in word of mouth.

4) Being a multinational brand, what are the strong points of Anker?

Anker strength is always its strong R&D which every day focus on developing new technology at affordable offerings to our consumers.

5)Does Anker have any manufacturing unit in India? Or all the products are imported?

Currently, we don’t have a manufacturing unit in India. All the products are imported by our National Distributor

6) How is the accessories market evolving?

With the rapid growth in Smartphone, the accessories attachment ratio is also growing along with it. Consumers these days prefer to have branded and good quality accessories at affordable offerings.

7) India, geographically as well as culturally is a very diverse nation, so Anker has ever been faced any issue technically or while doing business here?

Anker business is distribution driven model. We have a strong network of distributors across India who takes care and support the need of the market respectively

8) What new tech trends we can see in the year 2019?

We can see more technology offering on IOT space, Smart and integrated home devices. Accessories will have more innovation to it as the need for the same is increasing rapidly day by day.

9) Anker offers a wide range of products, which of them are focusing especially for the Indian market?

We will be focusing on our new line of power banks, cables, unique portable projectors, Robovacs for India market.

10) Why Anker has a couple of sub-brands, why not a single entity to offer various products under a single brand name. For example, Anker also offers audio products and Soundcore as well, thus what is the difference

Anker Innovations is our parent company which has various divisions working on a different category of products. We wanted to have a specific focus on each category with R&D teams working respectively for those categories. In order to have a clear vision and focus we follow the strategy of different brands for the different category under Anker Innovations, our brands are

  • Anker – Smart Charging Accessories
  • Soundcore – Smart Audio products
  • Eufy – Smart Home Appliances
  • Nebula – Smart Projector
  • Roav- Smart Car Accessories

 

11)Would you like to share some sales number?

Our aim is to do 30Mn USD by 2020.