Gee Pee touch phones at Rs 7,500

Gee Pee Infotech, a privately-held, medium-sized company, has revised the pricing strategy for mobile handsets in Kolkata by launching touch-screen phones at Rs 7,500 that directly competes with the i-phones launched by estranged national telecom giants.

GeePee first revised the price quotient with the launch of its GSM handsets at Rs 994, available without a bundling offer, with colour display, audio and video player features.

According to Bijay Agarwal, managing director of GeePee Infotech, "We are manufacturing the phones in Shenzhen, China."

At present, only CDMA phones are priced below Rs 1,000 and are bundled with connections.

The black and white GSM phones offered by Vodafone Magic Box are also bundled with connections and cost Rs 1,199.

"We are also looking at hiring not less than 100 people for setting up a research and development centre, preferably in Bengal. We are talking to companies in Japan and China for component suppy and technology partnership for a handset manufacturing plant we are planning to set up in 2009," Agarwal added.

"Our aim is to make mobile phones affordable for every income group in India. Also we believe that after sales service is the most important factor responsible for the success of any mobile brand," Agarwal said.

Gee Pee has already opened a number of their service centers, 'Gee Pee Care' at all the important cities and strategic places.

Gee Pee targets to cover 5 per cent of the total market share of India by 2010.

"Telecom is one industry which has not been impacted so much and therefore our sales in both urban and rural Bengal have been growing equally. In 2009, we plan to go pan-India with our handsets. We are also going to sell our handsets in Bangladesh, Kenya and Gulf countries from 2009," Agarwal claimed. Although Agarwal declined to divulge sales figures, he had earlier said that the company's intention was to sell 50,000-75,000 of these handsets per month. Gee Pee, the GSM mobile brand was launched in Kolkata on September 2007. The overwhelming response soon led to its expansion in other 11 states of eastern and northern India within 2008 and it aims to be present pan-India by 2009.