After Xiaomi, Gionee and Lenovo, Asus has also announced local manufacturing of its highly successful Zenfones in India under Make In India initiative of our Honorable Prime Minister. Like the other Chinese companies, Asus has also engaged the reputed Foxconn to manufacture its phones in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh.
Asus will kick-start its manufacturing operations in partnership with Foxconn. Initially, Zenfone 2 Laser phones will be manufactured which will soon be followed by ZenFone Go, which was launched in India few days ago. The company aims to manufacture 150,000 smartphones per month by the end of the current financial year which will account for almost 80% of sales in India.
Commenting on this development, 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%. 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.”
Chang further added, “We are aggressively targeting the Indian market. We aim to achieve 5% market share in the country by next year and empower all our customers with luxury.”
Last month, at the first edition of Zen Festival in India, Asus launched its new samrtphones – Zenfone Selfie, Zenfone 2 Laser and Zenfone 2 Deluxe. Zenfone 2 Laser, the first smartphone that will be manufactured in India, received such an overwhelming response that the company had to prepone the sale date on Flipkart.
The Zenfone 2 Laser comes with laser auto-focus to justify its name. It has a 5.5-inch HD (1280x720p) display with Gorilla Glass 4 protection. It is a Dual-SIM device and runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop with overlapping of new version of Asus ZenUI. It is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor in combination with 2GB RAM and 16GB of internal memory expandable up to 128GB via microSD card. This phone gets its juice from 3000mAh battery. This phone is equipped with a 13MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture lens and laser Auto Focus having 0.3 second focus time and dual-LED flash. It also houses a 5MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture lens.
Asus Zenfone Go sports a 5-inch HD (1280×720 pixels) LCD display having a pixel density of 294ppi with an anti-fingerprint coating. It is driven by a 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6580 quad-core processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage extendable to 64GB via microSD card. It comes bundled with 100 GB of Google Drive storage, free for a period of 2 years.
This phone is equipped with an 8-megapixel autofocus rear camera and a 2-megapixel selfie camera in the front. It is packed with a 2,070mAh battery. It runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop OS with Zen UI on top.
