LG to spend $5 million in India to boost handset sales

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 02 January 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: South Korea's LG Electronics Inc said on Wednesday that its mobile handsets division would spend $5.0 million in India in 2003 to market new CDMA phone models. LG had already sold over 600,000 phones that use code division multiple access technology for limited mobile services and basic phone applications since the service was launched in India about two years ago, LG officials said in a news conference. Indian mobile phone firms use the competing GSM technology for their services but five fixed-line telephone firms offer a cheaper limited radius mobile service using CDMA technology to more than 500,000 subscribers. "Various companies together have a subscriber capacity of one million phones now and it is expected that five to six million new CDMA subscribers should be added next year," KK Kushwaha, LG's vice-president for CDMA terminals, told the conference. India, a country of over a billion people, had 9.73 million mobile phone subscribers at the end of November. That base is expanding at over 80 per cent a year. Neighbour China, which has a slightly larger population, had 200.3 million cellphone uses at the end of November. A legal dispute over whether fixed line firms should be allowed to offer limited mobility services has restricted market growth in India and the issue is still awaiting approval from a tribunal. But India's top court has allowed firms to launch limited mobile services using the CDMA-wireless in local loop (WLL) technology in the interim period. In July, LG which competes with Motorola, Samsung and Nokia announced it had won a $100 million order from India's Reliance Industries to supply mobile handsets. LG was the sixth largest maker of handsets in the world in the third quarter of 2002 with a 4.4 per cent market share but the No 2 maker of handsets using CDMA technology with a 22 per cent slice of the market.

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