Samsung 3G phone to use Qualcomm chip

Lucas van Grinsven

PARIS: South Korea's Samsung Electronics said it will debut with a third generation mobile phone on the European market in the third quarter of 2003, using a Qualcomm chip that was announced last week.

The world's fastest growing mobile phone maker, with a ten percent market share trailing behind Nokia and Motorola, also said it expected moderate growth in the global cellphone market to 435 million units in 2003 from some 410 million units this year. "It will be modest growth. Next year global demand will be 435 million units," Senior Vice President of Samsung's telecommunications division, Park Sang-Jin, told Reuters in an interview.

He reiterated Samsung would continue to gain market share, although he declined to give a forecast, saying India and China would be the fast growing markets next year. It would cater to these markets by launching lower-end phones rather than its usual mid- and high-end models. "We're going to have phones for those markets which would be considered mass market models in the West," he said.

Thanks to its high-end product mix, Samsung has the fattest profit margin in the handset industry, rivaling even Nokia's 22 percent with a 26.8 percent operating margin. The flat TVs to semiconductor company, on the sidelines of a product roadshow, also shed light on its launch plans of a future series of smartphones based on software from three different vendors: U.S.-based Palm and Microsoft, and Britain's Symbian.

Showing prototypes of Microsoft and Palm phones, Park told Reuters his company will take the Microsoft smartphone in production by the third quarter of next year.

"Most demand (for the Microsoft smartphone) will come from the North American market," he said, adding the phone that can download video clips, handle email and instant messaging, would be benefiting from the recently upgraded fast wireless CDMA2000 1x networks in the American markets.

© Reuters