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hina-based device manufacturer ZTE Corporation recently said that it was expanding its target market in Indonesia to include the middle and upper segments and is ready to compete with leading brands.

He Shiyou, the executive vice president of the ZTE Corporation, said that the company has traditionally worked with telecommunications operators who bundle handsets, mainly feature phones, with mobile services.

“These handsets are more for the middle and lower market segments,” he said.

He added that the company, however, had decided to expand its market to include the middle and upper segments through the sale of their Android-powered smartphones and tablets.

Unlike its feature phones, ZTE will bypass operators and sell their smartphones directly through the market, a move the company categorizes as going “open market”.

According to He, the new strategy in Indonesia ran parallel to the global strategy of the company to become a brand name on par with other recognized device makers, including Apple and Samsung.

Currently, 90 percent of ZTE’s global handset distribution as well as revenue are linked to bulk purchasing by operators, with the remainder coming from the open market sales of devices, with ZTE’s business in Indonesia adhering closely to the overall trend.

“We want to increase our revenues from our open market distribution channel to 40 percent. Only then can our brand name be popular and become part of the top three brands worldwide,” he added.

Based on the Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), ZTE shipped the fourth highest number of handsets worldwide in the second quarter of 2012.

In that quarter, ZTE shipped 8 million smartphones globally, 300 percent higher than the same quarter in the previous year.

With that, the company, which started in the handset business in 1998, now has a 5.2 percent share of the global market.

He pointed out that the major markets for ZTE currently were China, which contributed 20 to 30 percent to total revenue. Other sizable markets for ZTE have been the US and Europe, he added.

Meanwhile, Indonesia contributed only one percent to ZTE’s global revenues.

“However, Indonesia is a big market and that is why we believe that this number will grow,” he noted.

In order to expand their Indonesian market by introducing middle and upper end devices, ZTE has launched the ZTE Skate, their 4.3-inch screen Android-based smartphone.

The smartphone marks the launch of the company’s first open market smartphone in Indonesia, he noted.

“Our target is to ship 100,000 units in Indonesia by the end of the year. We have sold out the first batch of our shipments,” he said.

The smartphone, however, was shipped much later than in China, the US and Europe, where it was introduced early this year.

The smartphone was introduced late in Indonesia partly to review how it performed in other markets, and to see whether the Indonesian market could duplicate the sales seen in other markets.

According to He, ZTE wanted to launch a product that did well in bigger markets as part of their effort to revamp the image of their devices, which have long been associated with the middle-lower end handsets.

“We are introducing advanced, top-end products from advanced markets to change our image. So our competition is no longer with other China-made products, but with the likes of Samsung and Apple,” he added.

Samsung has been aggressively taking over the Indonesian smartphone market through he launch of a host of new products, including the Galaxy SIII, which also runs on Android.

Based on figures from IDC, Android remains the dominant operating system in the market with a 45.8 percent share of the platform market in 2011.

He added that the company would continue bringing in competitive products into Indonesia, especially those products that were successful abroad, to build their brand name here.

ZTE recently launched the ZTE Grand X smartphone in the UK.

“It is difficult to survive simply with one product in the market. So we are bringing in more popular and well-accepted products in markets such as the US,” he said.