Colour mobiles below Rs 2000

Following Reliance Communications' move to break the sub-Rs 1,000 price barrier in the black and white CDMA sets, mobile phone manufacturers are working hard to break the sub-Rs 2,000 barrier for GSM colour mobile phones.

Korean giant LG Electronics is already working on models which will be sold at a price below Rs 2,000 in the next three months.

H S Bhatia, business group head, GSM Mobile, says : "Currently the cheapest colour phone is sold at Rs 2,300 but within the next three months, we will have a phone which will break the sub-Rs 2,000 barrier."

Nokia, the country's largest mobile phone maker expects the prices of models to go below the Rs 2,000 mark. Sunil Dutt, director sales, Nokia said: "With entry level prices coming down from Rs 5,000 to slightly over Rs 2,000, we do not see it impossible for prices of colour phones to go sub Rs 2,000. It is a matter of time."

At the moment, an entry level range is from Rs 2,200 to Rs 2,500 in the retail shops. Motorola's colour phones are sold at Rs 2,500, while Samsung offers them at Rs 2,400 and Nokia is priced at Rs 2,200.

Very soon, the gap between colour and black and white phones would be less than Rs 500, and help the mobile phone market to increasingly move towards colour phones. Just two years ago 30 per cent of the mobile phones were colour, but currently, it constitutes for 70 per cent of the markets.

The Indian Cellular Association points out that there will be need for over 400 million phones in the next four to five years. According to its estimate, at least 250 million of these phones would be under Rs 2,000. This would also shrink the second-hand mobile phone market, which constitutes around 20 per cent of the total sales in the market. Vodafone, which has recently got a clearance to buy out Hutch's stake in Hutch-Essar, has also announced that it would offer the Indian consumers its own branded phones at rock bottom prices.

Reliance Communication (RCom), yesterday, launched a series of phones under its Classic brand, priced as low as Rs 777.