New Delhi : The mobile phone fever is catching up. After the good news of cellular industry growing 100 per cent in the last one year ending September 30, it now seems clear that the fever is catching up. Finnish mobile phone major Nokia has sold over 5 lakh handsets during the last nine months and emerged as the number one player in the market, which witnessed a shipment of one million handsets during the same period.Not to be confused with the entire shipments for white channel sales. The one million sales were both through the white and grey channels. Industry estimates shows that other players like Motorola, Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens and Panasonic have together contributed the remaining five lakh of handsets during the period, again both through white and grey channels.
However, Nokia officials refused to confirm the industry estimates of over five lakh shipments in nine months, but said: "It could be some what of that size". Mr Parikshit Bhasin, managing director of Nokia Mobile Phones India Ltd said: "We do not give out the figures of sales, you can depend on the industry figures".
Mr Bhasin, however, said that the company planned to launch two new models of handsets in the Indian market by next month.If that is not sufficient, Nokia is pinning its hopes on further reduction in customs duties in the upcoming budget.
Currently the effective duties paid by the customer including the sales tax is to the tune of 40 per cent. "With the duties coming down to reasonable level and the tariff structure changing in favour of customers, handsets sales would pick up," says Mr Bhasin.
Is Nokia anticipating a China kind of situation, where 60 million handsets were sold by four companies in a few years? "No. not in the near future. Purchasing power of Indians have not really improved to the level of Chinese. Let's wait and watch the situation before making any predictions," adds Mr Bhasin.
Are handsets companies opposing `limited mobility' in fixed phone services? "No, not at all. On the other hand, limited mobility would be good news for handset industry". Limited mobility phones with local call charges would bring down the cellular tariff and would help the handset sales", says Mr Bhasin.
IDC had predicted early this year that the entire Indian handset market to be to the tune of 4.92 lakh units for the whole year of 2000 against four lakh units last year. But now that the shipment of Nokia alone for just nine months period had surpassed the estimated figure of the entire industry, IDC can reassess the situation and come out with a realistic prediction.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.