Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei is firming up plans to manufacture smartphones for the Indian market out of its facility in Chennai, which already makes networking equipment. This will help support its plans to expand its presence to over 200 cities with 20,000 outlets in three years.

In a report by Financial Chronicle on Sunday, Huawei said that it was “currently conducting quality evaluations and sorting out supply chain issues”. The firm presently makes handsets in China and oursources some production to Foxconn.

Victor Shan, president of Huawei India’s device business department, said in the article: “Low-level feature phones are preferred in rural areas while smartphones are preferred in tier I and tier II cities.” He added that tier I cities accounted for 60 percent of its smartphone sales there . Read more
Courtesy :www.zdnet.com

The Indian mobile handset market registered a drop of 5% in revenues during the financial year 2011-12 due to slump in sales of feature phones and lower average selling price of handsets, according to Cybermedia Reasearch. The revenues dropped to Rs 31,215 crore from Rs 33,031 crore from a year back said an annual survey by CyberMedia group’s flagship journal for the telecom industry Voice & Data.

The study surveyed over 30 mobile handset firms–both multi-national and Indian–selling feature phones, multimedia phones, enterprise phones and smartphones in India.

The homegrown handset makers who till a few years back gave a tough competition to international brands including Nokia and Samsung registered a negligible peresence. Their main stay—feature phones—saw a negative growth while the entry level smartphones of various companies saw a marginal rise.Read more
Courtesy : timesofindia.indiatimes.com