Samsung eyes 20% market share

Category: News | 1 Comment | Posted on July 19, 2006

Samsung hopes to capture one-fifth of India’s mobile phone handset market by focusing on the replacement market.

Around half of the phones now sold in the big cities such as Delhi and Mumbai are to customers upgrading from older, less fashionable models, said Sutikshan Naithani, vice president for sales and marketing at Samsung’s Indian subsidiary.

Samsung expects around 40 million handsets to be sold in the country this year. It expects the handset market to continue growing about 50% a year to reach close to 100 million units in 2008, when it hopes to have 20% of the market.

Samsung has discontinued its cheaper monochrome-screen models. The company’s handsets are priced between 8,000 and 22,000 rupees.

The South Korean company, the world’s No. 3 handset maker, has around 10 percent of the Indian market, having recently lost around 5 percentage points to makers of cheap, entry-level phones such as Nokia, Senior Vice President Ike Chung said.

Source: Reuters

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