Tech

India major growth market for Nokia

CIOL Bureau

18 Jun 2006 21:16 IST

New Update

Srinivas R

SINGAPORE: India will become the second biggest market for Nokia in terms of
volume after China by 2010.

Addressing partners, media and analyst at Nokia Connection 2006, Urpo
Kaiyalainen, Senior vice president, CMO, APAC said India, Indonesia, Vietnam and

Bangladesh are the emerging growth areas for the company.

Kaiyalainen said that Asia Pacific is contributing 20 per cent of the market
share after Europe for the company in terms of volumes.

Meanwhile, in its annual survey, the Voice and Data magazine has said that Nokia
has done exceptionally well in the GSM space and commands around 72.5 per cent

market share in India.

However, in the CDMA space, Nokia lost its number two position and was ranked
fourth with a market share of 7.3 per cent, the magazine said. Voice and Data

estimates that the company has over Rs 7892 crore in revenues with over 62 per

cent growth over the last year.

This makes Nokia the first Telecom MNC to cross the billion-dollar revenue from
India.

Speaking on the new trends in the markets, Kaiyalainen said consumers are
looking for phones, which has feature to play music such as MP3, FM or any other

kind. "This year around 80 million music enabled phones are expected to sell,"

he said.

By 2010, around 900 million phones with music feature will be expected to be
sold globally. He added: "In a year or two, mobile phones with e-mail feature to

become more prominent."

The Indian Communications and IT department has recently said that India's
mobile phone subscribers exceeded 100 million at the end of May.

India joined China, the United States, Japan and Russia to have more than 100
million mobile phone users. With nearly three million new phone users every

month, India is one of the fastest growing telecommunications markets.

Analysts have attributed the growth to the low cost of handsets and rising
incomes of the 300-million strong middle class.

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