Samsung launches Galaxy C9 Pro, bets on subsequent buyers to drive sales

The country's largest smartphone maker, Samsung India, is betting big on second- and third-time smartphone buyers to drive sales of its newly launched Galaxy C9 Pro.

"We do innovations keeping consumers in mind. We are confident that the launch of Galaxy C9 Pro will revolutionalise the market. It is actually targeting second- and third-time buyers who are looking for new upgrades. We are confident that it will drive our market share up", said Aditya Babbar, deputy general manager, mobile business, Samsung India, at the national launch of Galaxy C9 Pro here.

"India is the second largest smartphone market. Definitely, will be new buyers coming in and (existing) consumer upgrading. The upgrader is the biggest market and we are targeting it," he added.

Priced at Rs 36,900, the Samsung Galaxy C9 Pro will be available in two colours -- black and gold.

Interested buyers can pre-book the device through select stores and online channels from January 27 and avail the pre-booking offer of one-time screen replacement for a period of 12 months.

The smartphone will be on sale at all retail channels in the latter half of February 2017.(Read More)

Jio, Airtel spar over interconnect issue

Latest News - A fresh round of war of words broke out between Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel on Monday, with the former alleging that its service continues to face congestion issues with some of the large operators, including Airtel, not providing adequate points of interconnection (PoI) — a charge the incumbent operator refuted.

Reliance Industries (RIL) in a statement said its telecom subsidiary Jio has garnered 72.4 million subscribers within four months of commencement of services but continues to face congestion issues as interconnect capacity provided by some large operators is "still way below requirement".

"The POI capacity provided by these operators is still way below requirement and is falling short of the customer addition pace of Jio, resulting in quality of service issues for Indian customers. The resultant call failure rates continue to be of the order of 175 calls failing out of every 1,000 calls from Jio to Airtel network when the QoS regulations mandate that no more than five calls out of every 1,000 calls can fail. Indian customers are still being denied the benefits of superior voice technology on Jio's state-of-the-art network," said the company in a post-result statement.

Replying to the allegation Airtel said, “About 60 million customers of Jio are making calls into the Airtel network. To meet this requirement, we have provided 21,557 PoIs to them which is much higher than their demand of 14,164 E1s for catering to 100 million customers. Approximately 17,000 PoIs of the total POIs provided are dedicated to the outgoing traffic of Jio. Jio has yet to activate all the E1s we have provided to them."(Read More)