Intex To Start Manufacturing Mobile Phones In India

 

After the runnaway success of Aqua range of affordable smartphones, domestic mobile and consumer durables brand Intex Technologies is now planning to start the manufacturing of its mobile handset in the country. The company said it will be investing Rs 500 crore in setting up a smartphone manufacturing plant in the country. Currently, the mobile phone maker is in talks with three State Governments — Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand — to finalize the location for the plant.

“We are in talks with these State Governments and had a meeting last week for setting up a manufacturing plant. We already have three manufacturing plants in Jammu and Himachal Pradesh for feature phone and other computer peripherals. The idea is to manufacture smartphones in the new plant,” Keshav Bansal, Director, Marketing, Intex Technologies, told BusinessLine at the launch of its first Firefox OS based mobile ‘Cloud FX’ priced at Rs 1,999 on Monday.

It will be exclusively available through Snapdeal and the company aims to sell around five-lakh units over the next three months. With a 2MP rear camera, it has features such as bluetooth, Wi-Fi, dual Sim and comes with 128MB RAM, 256MB memory that is expandable up to 4GB and a 1,250 mAh battery.

The company has also said it will introduce three more devices on the Firefox platform within the next 12 months, including a sub-Rs 5000 3G Firefox phone by December, said its business head for mobile phones, Sanjay Kumar Kalirona. Jane Hsu, director of product marketing at Mozilla’s mobile devices group also told ET that the company will increase its reach in the Indian market through tie-ups with larger local brands such as Micromax, Karbonn and Lava.

Meanwhile, Intex  is manufacturing products such as mobile batteries, chargers, phone panel covers and speakers in the existing plants. The company sells its products in 70 countries and the mobile handsets are also going to be exported to many countries in future. Currently, it is exporting its mobile phones to only 15 countries, including Russia, West Asia, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The company that generated more than Rs 2,000 crore as turnover last year, expects a turnover of Rs 3,500 crore by the end of this fiscal and has set the target to become Rs 6,000 crore by 2015-16, said the company.