India’s own and lone smartphone company Lava is fighting hard among Chinese and Korean players in the world’s most populous country with a mixed feeling of having survived this onslaught while also expressing pain that only they are the ones doing this. “This country needs more players {Indian} to compete,” said Lava’s Managing Director Sunil Raina in an exclusive interaction with The Hindu.
“The good feeling is that we are an India-based company, fighting against global giants, with each one having about 15 to 20% market share, globally. Despite the difference in scale, we are able to, slowly and gradually, extract share from them,” told Mr. Raina.
And to draw that market share, Lava took some time to build trust with consumers. “We had to work very hard, not just to build products, build services, build experience, but also to prove to people and make them believe that it is the global standard,” said Mr. Raina.
Now, Lava is witnessing multiple growth cycles than it used to previously. This year has largely been good for the brand. It was the fastest growing in sub-10K and second fastest in sub-15K in Q3 2025. Lava recorded about 88% growth during festive season over last year’s festive period. It expected to continue this run.
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Currently, Lava is focused upon sub-30k market, which is around 80% of the total mobile industry.
Mr. Raina says that Lava works around a broader perspective of offering a holistic customer experience. “We have been able to differentiate ourselves from a very tangible perspective, to whichever segment we go to,” he said. “There are four areas where we really are trying to excel: aesthetics, the build quality, stock Android experience with updates and upgrades, and customer service,” he went on.
Lava is among the first companies to offer services at home, which is still there. In case of their Agni series, they do replacements at home, and for the rest of the series, they will come and pick up the device from home. “It is all about giving a great experience to the customer – inside and outside the box,” said Mr. Raina. Consumer experience is the core of our philosophy, he added.
According to him, customer experience consists of two things: the phone should last longer and experience should not be compromised with time. Lava has a mechanism through which they can identify any issue at every stage of customer usage and keep on fixing it through software updates.
Mr. Raina points out that the mobile industry is flat because smartphone replacement cycles have gone up as phones are now much more stable and there’re nothing disruptive innovation happening in the segment. He thinks that rising average selling price (ASP) is not a critical factor here because of easy financing options available everywhere.
Lava relies heavily on retail channels for growth in India, but they also sell on Amazon. “We are about 25% online and 75% offline.” Even though, Lava doesn’t own exclusive stores, Mr. Raina said that they are being able to reach up to about 1,00,000 retailers in the country.
Being a manufacturer themselves, Lava is more focused towards 5G devices. They were the first to bring the most affordable 5G device in the country, sub-8K. “We want to make 5G more and more affordable, and that’s why our focus is primarily on 5G,” he noted.
Lava not only sells phones in India, but exports to neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. “In Nepal, I think we have between 25 – 30% market share already, and in Bangladesh, we’re in the range of 10% already. We believe that, you know, once you crack India well, it’ll be easier to do the rest of the world,” said Mr. Raina. “We have started exporting smartphones recently. That is just that business is getting built now,” he added. The company claims that they have an annual capacity of producing 42 million units, both assembly and SMT.
In Q4 2025, Lava will be launching Agni 4 in the mid-segment on November 20. “Things slow down a bit in the Q4 because bulk of the buying happens in Q3, but I think we’ll surely grow over last year.”
On accessories, Lava is focusing primarily on audio and on the general accessories, like chargers and cables. TWS is going to be the primary growth driver in accessories.
Recently, smartphone prices have gone up on rising storage costs, and because of that Lava also feels that a price correction will be required. “We have to pass on some of it to the consumers. There’s no way, no choice. Prices will go up, and as they stabilise or come down, then we’ll do the correction again. But right now, the correction has to be done to accommodate that escalation,” said Mr. Raina.
In 2026, Lava has some ideas about how to uniquely position and differentiate themselves. “AI is going to be a big focus that we will have in our devices. That is the starting point for building devices with meaningful AI applications,” concluded Mr. Raina.
Published – November 12, 2025 05:50 pm IST
