Noida draws mobile phone makers

Noida is emerging as a hub for smartphone makers. While the city earlier housed assembly and manufacturing facilities, a number of mobile handset makers are setting up offices and research units there.

India is expected to overtake the US as the second largest smartphone market next year, according to a recent Morgan Stanley research report. KPMG reckons India will have 180 million smartphones by 2019, 13.5 per cent of the global market.

Chinese handset manufacturer Vivo leased 250,000 sq ft in the World Trade Centre at Greater Noida for its office, R&D centre and manufacturing unit this year, according to US-based real estate services firm Colliers International.

Another Chinese smartphone maker Oppo Mobile has leased 160,000 sq ft in Noida while homegrown company Lava, which recently inaugurated its second facility in the city, took up another 100,000 sq ft office space there, according to Colliers.

“Lava’s corporate office is in Noida and the national operations are managed from there,” said Sanjeev Agarwal, chief manufacturing officer, Lava International. The company had a repairing unit in Noida and would set up an R&D facility nearby, he added.

Sky Li, president of Oppo India, said Noida had become a hub for smartphone companies because of space and feasibility. Oppo, which has set up an assembly unit and plans to build a surface-mount technology factory in Noida, will hire 1,000 employees. Gionee, too, has plans to set up its R&D facility in the Delhi NCR region by the first quarter of 2017. The company is headquartered in Delhi.

“A smartphone manufacturing ecosystem in the region makes the area desirable,” said Vishal Tripathi, research director at Gartner. “Now that a couple of companies have set up their offices and R&D facilities in Noida, others will follow.

There are 25 handset makers that have production facilities in India and 37 mobile phone manufacturing units have come up, creating 37,500 jobs, according to Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. After the Centre introduced a 10.5 per cent duty differential between imported handsets and those made locally in last year’s budget, Noida has become India’s biggest smartphone hub.