Astro Mobile continues to grow, opens new branch at Joina City Harare

Astro Mobile has officially opened another branch at Joina City Mall Harare. According to the marketing executive Masimba Ndoro this is a move meant to tap into the traffic at the shopping mall and a deliberate positioning strategy that is meant to assert Astro as a premium brand in the mobile phone business.

This is the third shop they have launched this year after the 2 branches outside Harare in Masvingo and Marondera, signaling growth in the company. They also have a distribution agreement with TelOne, NetOne, TalkCity, Topics and Truworths shops.

The shop is located next to the Joina City Spar and is showcasing, among other products, the flagship Astro V2 Plus, an improvement on the Astro V2, with a Sony 18 mega pixel camera front camera, 16 Gig Memory, Mali 450MP GPU processor and 2 gig DDR 3 RAM. Other products on exhibit included a laptop with a detachable touchscreen targeted at the education sector and Astro flatscreen television sets.

All products at the shop carried a 10% opening discount and they offered free support and free accessories including batteries, porches and earphones for select models.

One will be curious to know how this shop will perform with time as it is not only situated where the costs are higher (Joina City is prime real estate and rentals are notoriously high) and where the second hand Ximex alternatives are just next door. Brick and mortar businesses are continuously becoming expensive and companies that include banks are fine-tuning their products to waiver overheads.