Why NextBit refused to go the Moto way, and chose Flipkart as an exclusive partner

At a time when major smartphone manufacturers like Mi and Motorola are opting for Amazon India as their exclusive partner to launch their newest offerings, Nextbit has chosen to look the other way.

The San Francisco based ‘cloud first’ company has picked Indian e-commerce segment leader Flipkart to launch its Robin smartphone for an asking price of Rs 19,999. When asked why they chose Flipkart over Amazon, NextBit India Head Shankar Parasaram said, “They’re (Flipkart) doing very well and offered us the best support, so why not!”

The Nextbit Robin hits pre-order today and will be shipped from 30th May. The company, however, confirmed shipping products directly to Flipkart’s warehouses across the country. Flipkart will then take care of stocking and logistics. “They’ve done a lot of hand-holding for us”, Parasaram said. He refused to share the number of devices shipped initially.

The Nextbit Robin features a 5.2-inch Full HF display. Under the hood you get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor mated to 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage with no memory card expansion. Nextbit will also offer over 100 GB of cloud storage, for those looking for additional storage space, you can even back up apps to the cloud automatically when you run out local storage.

Until recently, Motorola had always got Flipkart on board as an exclusive partner for the devices that it intended to sell. However, it recently dropped Flipkart in favour of Amazon for the Moto G4 launch.

Amit Boni, Motorola India Head recently said in an interview."Evaluation of strategy and evaluation of route-to-market dictate what partners do we go with. And Amazon is an amazing partner in India."

When asked about news reports of e-commerce companies slashing incentives, Parasaram is dismissive. “We didn’t feel any of that. However, there’ll be no flash sale. People said it’s painful for consumers. It’ll be an open sale, and we’ll try to replenish the stock as soon as we can”, he said.

NextBit is not considering offline distribution or other online partners as of now.