Bengaluru: Samsung India, the local arm of South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, announced the launch of its first Internet of Things or IoT-enabled washer-dryer on Friday.
The new product, called FlexWash, will be available at Samsung outlets and other major retailers from 15 August and will be priced at Rs1.45 lakh.
The FlexWash comes with two drums—a 3.5kg top load and a 21kg drum at the bottom—to give consumers the flexibility to choose different wash cycles simultaneously.
It also uses three concepts that Samsung has created called EcoBubble, Bubble Soak and Vibration Reduction Technology. While the first two make the machine more effective in creating foam for faster and more effective cleaning, the last one is aimed at making it noiseless.
Samsung’s new machines can also be operated remotely using its Smart Control app since they are IoT enabled. The firm is ready to adopt IoT across its product portfolio, it said in a statement.
“This is an all-in-one washing machine which gives you three unique benefits – flexibility (two drums), performance benefits (EcoBubble, Bubble Wash, vibration reduction) and a smart connect (IoT)," Samsung India’s director of consumer electronics, Rishi Suri, said in an interview on the sidelines of a press conference on Friday.
The firm’s washing machine sales grew 30-35% in 2016 and 45-50% so far in 2017. Samsung runs two manufacturing facilities in India – in Noida and Chennai – and three research and development centres. Its Bengaluru R&D facility is the company’s largest outside Korea and highlights the importance of India as a market for Samsung, Suri said.
“Off late we’ve seen that there is a good amount of buoyancy in the (consumer electronics) market and not just restricted to big cities or metros. We are finding that demand in the semi-urban as well as the rural areas is increasing tremendously due to income levels going up and other reforms coming in," he added.