Videocon to expand phone assembly line

Videocon Mobile Phones, a part of the $6-billion global conglomerate Videocon Group, is gearing up to tap the burgeoning mobile phone market in the country by opening up one more assembly line at Hyderabad in the current fiscal with an investment of Rs 60 crore.

Interacting with Deccan Herald, Mobile Phones Division Business Head Jerold Chagas Pereira said the company is reaching out to consumers to consolidate its market share in the feature phone and smartphone category.

“Even though we are one of the later entrants in the mobile handset business, growth in our distribution requires that we line up one more assembly line at Hyderabad to address this demand. To expand the facility in the second phase, we will invest an additional Rs 60 crore.”
“We already have assembly units operating at Kashipur, Uttarakhand and Aurangabad in Maharashtra. We want to become one of the top three players in the industry,” he said.
Pereira said at present only 25-30 per cent of components within Videocon’s mobile handsets are procured or manufactured in India, and the rest of the components have to be sourced from outside India, mainly from Taiwan and China, since these components are currently not available in India.

“Right now, we have a production capacity of 300,000 handsets per month and are ramping up capacity to 1 million with the addition of new lines and opening up of new production facilities,” Pereira said. He also said the company has the ability of converting lines for handset manufacturing at its existing plants where most of their other electronics and electric items are manufactured.

Videocon Industries has 17 factories spread across India and nine of them are fully operational.

When Videocon launched its telecom division it started manufacturing mobiles. “During that initial stages we brought out mobiles as bundled product with various packages. Then we withdrew from certain circles and started focusing on mobile phones by constituting separate division,” he said.