Monday, September 10, 2012

Another breach into the dragon’s lair?

Mobile handset production in India has seriously lagged the Telecom Services Revolution. Current trends provide an opportunity to rectify this anomaly. Can India take it up when it matters?

Post liberalisation, the grand telecom story has been a flagship of India’s corporate prowess, and has developed business models that are benchmarks for players across the world. However the flip side of the story is that while players, both Indian and international, have lined up in good numbers for the telecom services space, a similar exuberance wasn’t visible in the telecom handset manufacturing space in the initial years.

Slowly but surely, the MNCs that saw India as a market also started seeing its potential as a manufacturing hub. LG has manufacturing facilities for handsets near New Delhi and on the outskirts of Pune. It is further planning now to set up a facility in South India to exporting handsets from here to European and CIS countries. Its Korean counterpart Samsung also manufactures mobile phones at its facility in Chennai. Market leader Nokia set up its plant at Sriperambadur, Chennai with a manufacturing capacity of 5,00,000 units per day. The Indian Cellular Association (ICA) came out with a report titled ‘Enabling the mobile handset and component manufacturing value chain in India’ in 2005, where it had mentioned that indigenous design and manufacturing would help companies achieve higher localisation.

Considering the present scenario, the field is expected to split wide open now with the right impetus. India has become the world’s second largest mobile handset market with handset sales expected to reach 140 million units in 2010 and grow to 206 million units in 2014, a CAGR of 20% (Gartner). Trends could soon change, considering the thrust being provided by the emerging domestic players who have eaten up a substantial market share from established international players in a short time. As was reported by IDC some time back, market leader Nokia saw its market share drop alarmingly to 36.3% in 2009 compared to 54% in the previous year due to players like Micromax, Spice, Lava, Karbonn and G’Five (read related story on G’Five in this issue of B&E).
 

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
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