Datawind plans smart phone unit in AP

April 22, 2015 04:59 pm | Updated 04:59 pm IST - VISAKHAPATNAM:

Affordable tablet maker Datawind will foray into low-cost smartphone making and has plans to set up three manufacturing units, one of them in Andhra Pradesh. The phones will be priced at Rs.1,999 and come with free internet for 12 months intending to tap the feature phone market that accounts for about 1.4 crore every year in India and convert such users to smartphones.

In keeping with the “Make in India” campaign, Datawind plans to set up three units, one of them in Visakhapatnam or Vijayawada with a space of 50,000 sft, Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli told reporters here on Wednesday. Another plant will come up at Amritsar and the third one in Central India.

The three units together will have a capacity to make 50 lakh phones. The first unit will go on stream in 90 days and the others will follow. “We are looking at the IT policy of Andhra Pradesh and are quite upbeat about the quality educational facilities and are keen on coming here,” he said.

The three units will be set up investing Rs.165 crore it has raised in an IPO on Toronto Stock Exchange.

The idea was to make internet available to those who could not afford to buy expensive smartphones, Mr. Tuli said pointing out the Chinese businesses were driven by Internet access.

Duty waiver

In a reversal of policy, the budget for the current year has increased duty on finished phones from 6 to 13.5 per cent and for assembling brought it down to zero per cent.

Mr. Tuli estimates that about 15 crore phone users would switch to the zero duty category and Datawind aims to capture about 3 per cent of that market.

Datawind, known for making the low-cost Akash tablet (now Ubislate), has 16 to 18 per cent of the overall tablet market and 55 per cent of the sub-Rs.5,000 market selling about 1.5 lakh of the 2.55 lakh tablets.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.