Mobile Handset News Round Up: Mindtree Enters Mobile Production & Chinese Player Coolpad Comes to India
This week Mindtree announced that it will enter the mobile products business and begin making handsets. Don’t jump yet, because they will be white labeled products. The solution will be called N!Mo (Next in Mobility) and will offer feature-rich, ready to brand mobile handsets to telecom service providers and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).
This follows Mindtree’s acquisition of Kyocera India, the Indian arm of the handset manufacturer and puts the acquisition in perspective. The acquisition announced in September was pegged at nearly INR 28 crores, and gave Mindtree 600 new members to its team.
Coolpad enters India
News has it that China Wireless’ subsidiary Coolpad Communications will roll out its range of dual mode handsets and set up a research and development centre in India. It will invest close to INR 400 crores in the process.
Coolpad is the second arm of China Wireless to enter the Indian market after Yulong entered an agreement with Reliance ADAG to use their Reliance World outlets to conduct business. Coolpad has also partnered with Reliance Webstore of Reliance ADA Group, under which the latter will market the handsets through Reliance World and Reliance Mobile stores.
Coolpad is setting its target wide and plans to launch dual SIM handsets in the price range of Rs.8,000 in the following months, enabling it to tap into both CDMA as well as GSM users simultaneously. According Coolpad’s Managing Director, Mr Sami Al-Lawati, Coolpad is targeting over 15 per cent market share in the smartphone category in the next three years.
It is interesting to see the handset space heating up once again, and it just lends more weight to the overall growth of digital media in India. We are already seeing huge competition in the service provider space in what is essentially still an underfed market by many counts.
What these pieces of news also suggest is better technology coming in at relatively cheaper prices. And as the years go by we are likely to see more feature rich handsets being made affordable to the general users. This can not only drive revenues for mobile makers and service providers but also set the platform strong for the mobile Internet (as well as general Internet as the lines begin to dim between the two) to scale up. Which obviously as the backbone of this space can only benefit the digital media.
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