Motorola Introduces Mobile Exchange Offer
Motorola has announced India's first exchange offer on cellular phones. Under this scheme, users will be able to exchange and upgrade their handsets to the Motorola D628 and Star TAC 70 models.
Customers can now own a Motorola D628 in exchange for any other cellular phone model, by paying Rs 5,995. Launched in 1996, the model contains a 275 volt chip. Users can acquire Star TAC 70, a premium category cellphone, for Rs 16,995.
B V Raman, executive director, Motorola Cellular Subscribers Group, said the offer was aimed at capturing the latent demand in the market. "Research has revealed the existence of a large number of cellular phone users who want to own a Motorola handset," he added.
"The response has been very encouraging ever since we advertised the scheme," Raman pointed out. He did not want to reveal projections for new cellular phone sales under the exchange offer. The scheme is operational through a few dealers in Delhi on an experimental basis and will be soon extended to Mumbai.
Responding to a query on what Motorola intended to do with the older cellphone models that it received under the exchange scheme, Raman said that it would "scrap" them. Pulling out other companies' handsets from the market and introducing Motorola models would help it increase marketshare, he explained.The $29.8 billion (more than Rs 125,000 crore) US-based vendor says it is the market leader for cellphones in the country, a claim contested by rival Nokia.
Both the companies claim they have a marketshare of more than 30-32 per cent. The country's total cellphone market is inching towards the one million mark, some 40 per cent of which is estimated to be serviced by smuggled handsets.
For the current calendar year, Motorola had initially projected activations of about 600,000, which it pulled down to some 550,000 -- representing a zero growth over the previous year. Vendors like Ericsson, Alcatel, among others, are also similarly downscaling their projections. The exchange offer, say experts, is one of the ways to expand a lethargic market.