The company best known for its soft drinks will soon be offering gadgets and peripherals in China.
PepsiCo has now announced that it has entered into a deal with a licensing partner in order to allow it to market a line of mobile technology devices and accessories within the Chinese marketplace.
This deal will bring the sales of these devices to Chinese consumers in a few months from now.
While Pepsi did make it clear that it doesn’t have any intention of getting into the manufacture of smartphones as a part of its business, it is looking to mobile technology devices, accessories and merchandise. This, according to an email from a spokesperson at PepsiCo. In the email, the spokesperson explained that “Available in China only, this effort is similar to recent globally licensed Pepsi products which include apparel and accessories.”
Some have speculated about this new move into mobile technology by PepsiCo as soft drink sales slump.
At the time of the writing of this article, the licensing partner had not yet been named and no additional specifics about the deal had been released through the spokesperson.
That said, on October 11, the Mobipicker tech site reported that PepsiCo intended to release a mobile device called the Pepsi P1 smartphone. They said that it would hit the shelves in China on October 20 and that it was comprised of “decent but not high-end specs”. This indicates that while Pepsi may not be interested in actually manufacturing phones, they will still be using their licensing agreement to add their name to this kind of mobile tech.
This is far from the first licensing partnership into which PepsiCo has entered. It has a range of them across a full spectrum of different categories. In 2014, it entered into new deals with Bang & Olufsen, a Danish television and luxury stereo maker. In the same year, it joined up with Del Toro, the Italian shoemaker. These were agreements that brought about a number of different products to be included in its football campaign.
At the initial announcement of this mobile technology licensing agreement deal, the PepsiCo dropped by 0.5 percent at the same time that the rest of the market remained flat. It will be interesting to see the direction it takes as product launches take place.
