Samsung India to hike its mobile sales

NEW DELHI: Samsung India Electronics Ltd. said it expects to sell 12 percent more mobile handsets this year as more users upgrade to high-end phones in the world's fastest-growing major wireless market.

"We are concentrating on premium handsets -- those with colour screens and camera phones," Brian Lee, team leader for telecoms products at Samsung India, told reporters.

Lee said he expected the firm to sell 2.8 million handsets in 2004 compared with 2.5 million last year. Revenue from handsets was expected to rise 16.6 percent on the year to about $350 million, he added.

Unit sales were equally split between handsets working on the rival technologies, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA).

Over the past two years, South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and LG Electronics Inc have piggybacked on a massive expansion drive by Reliance Infocomm Ltd., the CDMA-based mobile services arm of the Reliance group which tops the Indian market.

Analysts say the Korean giants have aggressively hawked flip tops or clamshell phones with polyphonic ringtones and colour screens in India, driving customers away from bigger rivals such as Nokia in the intensely competitive market.

Apart from these firms, almost all global handset makers are vying for a share of the Indian wireless market, where about 1.3 million customers are entering each month thanks to one of the lowest call rates in the world.

Kunal Ahooja, vice president for telecoms at Samsung India, said there was strong demand from second and third-time buyers for value-added phones, which are capable of accessing the Internet at faster rates and have bigger screen displays.

"Colour screen phones were just five percent of total sales last year and now they constitute 25 percent of sales," Ahooja said.

There is huge pent-up demand for mobile phones in India, where less than four in a 100 people own a mobile phone. Analysts expect 25.8 million handsets to be sold in the country in 2004, almost double the 13 million sold during 2003.

A series of tax cuts and intense competition have made mobiles more commonplaces in parts of India where everyone from chief executives to rickshaw pullers and teenagers owns a handset.