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| Handsets with a common touch |
| Shivani Shinde & Pradipta Mukherjee / Mumbai/Kolkata Sep 07, 2009, 00:53 IST |
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Touchscreen phones are selling like hot cakes as they catch the youth’s fancy
Vishal Mehta, a mobile handset seller in Mumbai, has seen sales of touchscreen mobile phones grow to 30 per cent of his total sales this year from 10-15 per cent last year. Mehta has also seen a host of college-goers picking them up to make a style statement, thereby making a great contribution to the sales growth.
With touchscreen becoming the most wanted feature, manufacturers have gone the whole hog in introducing affordable handsets with latest features to garner a bigger market share. Though sometime back there were a few touchscreen phone models (HTC popularised the trend), the situation is different now.
Nokia recently launched Nokia 5230 and Nokia XpressMusic 5530 with a touch interface and whole lot of other features with a starting price of Rs 10,000.
At Samsung Mobiles, the focus is clearly on touchscreen handsets. While the company launched only two models last year, it has unveiled 21 models so far this year with a price range of Rs 11,000-Rs 35,000.
LG along with Qualcomm expanded its touchscreen portfolio into the smart category with the launch of LG GM730. At present, the company commands a 20 per cent share in the touchscreen segment. But with this launch, the company is expecting its market share to touch 30 per cent. Earlier this year, the company launched LG KP500 (nicknamed Cookie) — a full touchscreen product — for the Indian market available for Rs 9,990.
The price drop is definitely going to tilt the balance further in favour of touchscreen handsets. The India Mobile 2009 Handset Report by JuxtConsult — an online research consultancy — shows that while the most favoured price bracket is between Rs 1,000 and Rs 5,000 (53 per cent), close to 26 per cent people (24 per cent in the age group of 16-25 years) prefer to spend anywhere between Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 on handsets.
“Our intention is to bring about differentiation in terms of features and price points. Also we intend to provide multimedia buyers a reason to opt for upgraded products. We are not reducing prices of high-end, touchscreen phones, but all our new models come with updated features,” said Sunil Dutt, country head for Samsung Mobiles.
Samsung intends to grow its market share in the GSM and CDMA handset segments by more than 5 per cent annually to ensure its goal of achieving the highest shipment of handsets in the country.
According to IDC, India’s touchscreen device shipments in the financial year 2008-09 almost doubled. In 2007-08, the total number of touchscreen devices shipped into India was 0.65 million, which jumped to 1.33 million in 2008-09. The analyst firm also stated that the growth was being fuelled by the youth and young executives.
Anil Arora, business group marketing head-mobile communications of LG Electronics India, is expecting revenue generation of around Rs 24 crore from the recent launch. The company has plans to start manufacturing high-end phones in India soon. “Cookie is already being manufactured in our Pune factory. As high-end phones gather volume, we will look into manufacturing them in India,” said Arora.
Sony Ericsson is another player that plans to launch at least three touchscreen phones in the fourth quarter of 2009-10. Going a step ahead, Sony Ericsson will also launch ‘Yari’ to tap consumers interested in gaming or multimedia action. “Yari would be the industry’s first mobile phone with gesture gaming outside of the Japanese market. With gesture gaming, you move your body to play instead of pressing buttons on the phone,” said Catherine Cherry, marketing business manager at Sony Ericsson.
Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner, said: “Touchscreen and qwerty handsets remained a major driver for replacement sales and benefited manufacturers with strong, touch-focused midtier devices. For the remainder of 2009-10, manufacturers must offer products with features that consumers and operators have been demanding. The features on demand include touchscreen, focus on user interface and application/content ecosystems.”
Motorola Inc, whose phone business has lost more than $4 billion since 2007, is devoting most of its investment in smart-phone software to Google Inc’s Android, aiming for a larger share of the market for web-surfing devices. Christy Wyatt, Motorola’s vice- president in charge of software platforms, had said recently that in the mid- to high-tier portfolio, the only platform level investment Motorola was making at this point was in Android.
Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst, Gartner, felt that handset makers were launching new devices with new price points rather than providing a stripped down version of an earlier high-end phone. “This is also stemming from the fact that in these tough times, users are buying what they want to,” added Gupta.
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