Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Monday, November 27, 2006
Korea wants a piece of the Indian market pie
Korea hopes to sell lots of CDMA mobile phones to India. India is mostly using GSM and Korea makes a lot of phones for GSM for export, so I see no reason Korea wouldn't be able to sell also GSM phones to India.
We are talking ultra low cost phones here, starting at $30 end user price. With the US Dollar nose-diving lately these companies must feel lots of pressure to reach that price level. The note even mentions $20 in the long term.
An indication of the size and growth of the Indian market (Yahoo! News Nov 10): ISuppli believes India will drive growth for ultra-low-cost handsets next year. The nation will be home to 405 million mobile phone subscribers by 2010, up from 140 million by the end of this year, the market researcher says.
To my understanding Nokia and Motorola have been most successful in India so far.
I'm co-founder and CEO for a newly started company called Mobile Labs that focuses on text layout solutions for mobile phones and that has a solution for India-enabling mobile phones with rendering of Hindi, Bengali and other Indic scripts. As all know that've tried, Indic scripts are quite complex and the Latin "left-to-right" rendering scheme doesn't apply here. The company is so new we don't even have a website yet. I don't mean to market this solution here, but if you have an interest in Indic scripts just let me know.
Here are figures showing how many are actually using each Indic script. Even the "tiniest" one has 20M users (which is especially remarkable for a Swede, as we only have 9M people in total).
* Devanagari (used for Hindi 300 million, Marathi 100 million and Nepali 17 million) – totally some 400 million and yet another 100 million people understand Hindi/Devanagari
* Bengali (used for Bengali (Bangladesh 122 million and Calcutta 66 million) and Assamese (17 million in Assam, eastern India)) – totally plus 200 million
* Telugu (south of India) – 69 million
* Tamil (south of India and Singapore) – 66 million
* Gujarati (used to write the language Gujarati in western India) – 46 million
* Kannada (spoken and written in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra) – 44 million
* Malayalam (used in Kerala in southern India) – 35 million
* Oriya (used for the language Orissa in eastern India) – 22 million
* Gurmukhi (used for the language Punjabi in northern India) – 20 million
We are talking ultra low cost phones here, starting at $30 end user price. With the US Dollar nose-diving lately these companies must feel lots of pressure to reach that price level. The note even mentions $20 in the long term.
An indication of the size and growth of the Indian market (Yahoo! News Nov 10): ISuppli believes India will drive growth for ultra-low-cost handsets next year. The nation will be home to 405 million mobile phone subscribers by 2010, up from 140 million by the end of this year, the market researcher says.
To my understanding Nokia and Motorola have been most successful in India so far.
I'm co-founder and CEO for a newly started company called Mobile Labs that focuses on text layout solutions for mobile phones and that has a solution for India-enabling mobile phones with rendering of Hindi, Bengali and other Indic scripts. As all know that've tried, Indic scripts are quite complex and the Latin "left-to-right" rendering scheme doesn't apply here. The company is so new we don't even have a website yet. I don't mean to market this solution here, but if you have an interest in Indic scripts just let me know.
Here are figures showing how many are actually using each Indic script. Even the "tiniest" one has 20M users (which is especially remarkable for a Swede, as we only have 9M people in total).
* Devanagari (used for Hindi 300 million, Marathi 100 million and Nepali 17 million) – totally some 400 million and yet another 100 million people understand Hindi/Devanagari
* Bengali (used for Bengali (Bangladesh 122 million and Calcutta 66 million) and Assamese (17 million in Assam, eastern India)) – totally plus 200 million
* Telugu (south of India) – 69 million
* Tamil (south of India and Singapore) – 66 million
* Gujarati (used to write the language Gujarati in western India) – 46 million
* Kannada (spoken and written in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra) – 44 million
* Malayalam (used in Kerala in southern India) – 35 million
* Oriya (used for the language Orissa in eastern India) – 22 million
* Gurmukhi (used for the language Punjabi in northern India) – 20 million
