At the sidelines of the global preview of the Realme P4 Power – India’s first commercial smartphone with a huge 10,001mAh battery – we got a chance to sit down with Francis Wong, CMO, Realme India in Shenzhen, China. While we’ve already shared insights from our conversation about the idea behind the launch of the Realme P4 Power, what makes it different, and more, we also talked about Realme’s overall strategy for 2026 and how it’s rejigging its strategy.
Note: The answers have been slightly edited for the sake of brevity.
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Can you simplify Realme’s lineup for our users?
Number series now is mainly for offline consumers. The online shares of Realme’s Number Series have been decreasing year by year. Now it’s more of an offline product.
P series is an online model and stands for Pioneer — pioneering new technologies. It’s the idea, a reflection of Realme’s value for money brand point.
And then we have Narzo. However, Narzo was the series we built mainly for Amazon.
Basically, you can think that Narzo series itself is just a value for money model, same like P series, with a little bit of special designs on other models. So you’re going to see now those models are more, the design languages are bolder, and it looks more special. It’s mainly for students.
Lastly, GT series is our technology muscle. It’s a flagship. We are not seeking for high quantity of sales on GT series. Basically, it’s just there to represent the brand.
Can you explain the Ricoh partnership for the Realme GT 8 Pro, and what’s next?
The biggest thing we want to leverage from Ricoh is that they have such a great engineering team for camera optimisation. So, in code development, we are not only building the GT series, to have its advanced camera system. We want to put that software optimisation on the Number series, so that the Number series can leverage those flagship features. So, if you see every year we launch a GT and GT has so many advanced flagship features, those are the features we do the internal testing in the market from the flagship segment. Soon enough, those flagship features will be falling down to Number series and P series.
If it’s a camera feature, it goes to the Number series, and performance features on the P series. So, Ricoh technology will soon be introduced to the Number series.
While Realme started strong when it launched in India, it has lost momentum now. How is Realme planning to change that?
In the last few years, we have been facing a bit of trouble. We want to build a stronger offline.
If you see India’s smartphone market share ranks, you’re going to see Vivo is number one, Samsung, OPPO, those are the top brands. Previously, like in 2018 or 2019, before 2020, Xiaomi is number one. You see now Xiaomi, Realme, these online brands are not that popular as they were before.
One biggest reason is Indian consumers are getting richer. Their purchasing power has increased. Nowadays, they tend to purchase a phone from offline. They don’t care value for money as they did many years back. They want to experience the phone before making a purchasing decision. That is why we realised that if we are not turning to offline as soon as possible, this brand will not be sustainable in Indian market.
That’s why from 2020, we’ve decided to move the number series to offline channels. By the time we moved to the offline channels, our old online consumers are giving us a lot of criticism. They fear our phone has been overpriced. Now you’re having brand ambassadors. You’re wasting the money and now you’re increasing the selling price of your phone. We were criticised a lot.
However, if we want to be the offline channels, our number series has to be more expensive. That conflict gave us a lot of trouble. Our market share has been dropping.
To save us from that situation, we introduced the P series. Let P series to carry our old users, carry our old DNA of value for money. Let the number series go offline and price up so that Realme can become an omnichannel brand.
But one thing that we will always stick to is that dare to leap spirit. Dare to leap with the new technology and dare to democratise those high-end technologies at affordable prices. Value for money is the tagline that we will always carry forward.
What are the categories Realme is focusing on beyond smartphones?
Right now, our strategy is to focus on the audio and the wearable segment. Those are the two biggest categories we were focusing. We have cut the TV and the laptop. The reason we have been doing so was because in the TV industry and in the laptop PC industry, there are many giant players.
They have their global presence. They have huge volume. So, you’re going to realise that when they have such a huge volume, it’s easier for them to control the cost. Realme stands for value for money. If you cannot launch a value-for-money TV and a value-for-money laptop, then there’s no space for us. So, because most of our IoT volume are still coming from India, we don’t have that kind of global presence.
So that’s why we decided to focus on wearable and audio. At least for that, it’s more connected with your smartphone and easier to get the sales. For TV and laptop, I think it will be years of waiting.
What Realme’s focus for 2026?
On a broader level, our aim has not changed. We want to be the most popular smartphone brand among the youth. So, you see, in the last few years, Realme’s market share ranks sometimes from number three to number four, now number five. So, we want to be sitting within the top four smartphone brands sustainably and strongly. So that’s our big aim. To achieve that big aim, I think there were a few things we need to focus on.
One is the value for money DNA of Realme. In recent years, we’ve been launching too many smartphones, and we’ve been criticised for overpricing a lot. So, we need to cut down unnecessary models, reduce the models, increase our software benefits, and control our costs so that the value for money tagline can come back with Realme. That’s our biggest mission.
Apart from that, battery technology is something we’re going to be leading throughout the year. So, this year, we’re going to launch a lot of big battery phones. And then there’s AI. We have this AI Edit Genie, which is very popular among the youth. It’s a smart feature. We’re soon going to have the 3.0 version with a lot of new features, such as turning your graphics into videos. Those are the new features that we’re going to introduce by this year.
And last point is developing our offline channels slowly, and remaining strong in our online channels.
I think if we did those four things right, pricing strategy, big battery, AI, and the offline and online channel strategy, then Realme will be strong at the top four.
