Mobile Phone Production in India Growing
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India produced nearly 31 million mobile phones last year, at a value of about $5 billion.
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Mobile phones are expected to generate more money this year than traditional fixed-line services for the first time due to surging demand in developing countries such as China, India and Russia, an annual industry report said.
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Manufacturers focus on mobile standard, expected to hit the market next year.
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(InfoWorld) - New research has confirmed that India's mobile phone market is set for a period of fast growth, with revenue from cellular services expected to jump by more than 18 percent each year for the next five years. Most of the growth will come from rural areas, where only 2 percent of the population have access to mobile phones today, said Madhusudan Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner, which conducted the research. Service providers have already started to focus on rural markets, with aggressive rates and handsets priced at under $25, he said. Cellular service revenue in India will increase at a compound annual rate of 18.4 percent between this year and 2011, to reach $25.6 billion, Gartner estimated. Cellular revenue last year was $8.9 billion. As call rates fall from their current level of 2.6 cents per minute to rates comparable to fixed lines, which are about 0.9 cents per minute, a broad swathe of additional users will start using mobile phones, Gupta said. "The fixed-line infrastructure in India is not that good, which is giving enough of space for mobile wireless to move in," he said. Revenue from data will outpace that of voice services and contribute to about one fifth of revenue in 2011, more than double its share last year, although most of that growth will come from urban markets, Gartner said. As they expand into rural areas, operators will see their average revenue per user (ARPU) fall to $59.50 per year by 2011, from $82.1 last year. Successful operators will be those that make up for the falling ARPU through economies of scale, Gupta said. Operators are likely to collaborate by sharing infrastructure and outsourcing their network management to equipment vendors, and possibly system integrators, he added. For example, Bharti Airtel, a large Indian service provider, said Wednesday it had awarded a contract worth $2 billion over two-years to Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, to expand its network in rural areas and provide capacity management. The service providers should not be short of funds for expansion.Â Vodafone Group's acquisitionÂ in May of a controlling interest in the Indian operator Hutchison Essar, for $10.9 billion, has increased the valuation of all Indian service providers, and is helping them to attract private equity and other investments, Gupta said. The rural demand will come from businesses expanding into these areas, as well as from local businesses. Some individuals will own mobile phones, although the predominant model is likely to be a communally-owned handset, a concept already tried in some areas, Gupta said. India added 15.5 million mobile subscribers in the first quarter of this year, taking the total to 165.1 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Gartner expects 58 percent of the rural population and 95 percent of the urban population to be covered by mobile networks by 2011. That year, the total number of mobile connections in India will have increased to more than 462 million, according to Gartner. India's total population at that time will be close to 1.2 billion, according to some estimates.
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Countries like India could become a source of profit, a panel of wireless industry figures says.
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The maker of mobile phones said a push into emerging markets drove handset sales to a record.
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Indian mobile phone service providers  added more than 5 million GSM customers in May, taking the user  base to 130.6 million in the world's fastest-growing cellular  market, an industry body said on Friday.
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Indian mobile phone service providers  added more than 5 million GSM customers in May, taking the user  base to 130.6 million in the world&#39;s fastest-growing cellular  market, an industry body said on Friday.
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Growth is returning to the global wireless giant.
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Global mobile phone use will top 3.25  billion -- equivalent to around half the world&#39;s population --  in 2007 as cell phone demand booms in China, India and Africa,  a survey said on Wednesday.
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Worldwide mobile phone subscribers totalled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year (about one quarter of the world&#39;s population), according to the International Telecommunication Union.
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India is now growing faster than nearly any other sizeable economy in the world.
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IndiaÂs manufacturing grew 12.1 percent in the first half of the countryÂs fiscal year, which ended in September, compared with 9.5 percent in the period last year. The fast-paced growth of the manufacturing sector has been important in raising IndiaÂs economic output more than 8 percent annually. According to a survey by the Confederation of Indian Industry, a trade organization, more than 34 sectors of the 125 surveyed reported production growth greater than 20 percent. Foreign direct investment in India doubled to $4.4 billion in the first half of the fiscal year, Kamal Nath, above, commerce and industry minister, said.
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Indian mobile phone users outnumber fixed line customers for the first time, the country's telecoms regulator says.
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The global market for mobile telephones grew sharply in fourth quarter 2004, with sales up by 25 percent to a record 200 million units from the same period of 2003, but overall sector growth should slow in 2005, the research group Strategy Analytics reported.
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The number of Indian subscribers for landline and mobile phone services is soaring, putting the country on track to have 250 million users by 2007.
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The number of internet users in India who use their mobile phones to browse the web has more than doubled in the last year, Financial Express website reported on 6 June.