Karbonn Mobiles sees $1.3 billion revenue in FY15

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Karbonn Mobiles, India's No.3 smartphone brand, expects its revenue to rise more than 60 percent to 80 billion rupees in the fiscal year ending March 2015, as sales from smartphones surge in the world's second-biggest wireless market by number of users.

The unlisted New Delhi-based company will likely close the current fiscal year with about 49 billion rupees in revenue, Managing Director Pardeep Jain said on Wednesday. He expects higher proportion of smartphones in total sales to fuel growth for the next fiscal year.

Basic and feature phones still account for more than three quarters of total handset sales in India. But smartphone sales are growing at a much faster pace, with the market flooded by low-cost phone models mainly from a host of local Indian brands including Micromax and Karbonn.

Smartphone sales in India nearly tripled to more than 44 million in 2013, according to data from IDC, whereas the overall handsets market grew 18 percent to 257 million. Samsung Electronics is the leader in India's smartphone market, followed by Micromax and Karbonn.

Karbonn on Wednesday unveiled three new smartphones powered by hexa-core and octa-core processors from Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek . Karbonn, which last month signed a pact with Microsoft to make phones running on the Windows phone software, will launch two Windows phone models in May, Jain said.

(Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Anand Basu)