With a view to augmenting its market in emerging India, Nokia, the world's largest handset manufacturer, will start a design facility in Bangalore.
Officials also said India is expected to become the company's second largest market by 2010.
"Nokia intends to start two new design facilities one in Rio de Janerio (Brazil) and another one in Bangalore. It is important for us to be closer to the market and get feedback from our customer," Mitti Storckovius, director, corporate strategy, Nokia, said.
Nokia leads the handset market in the country by a huge margin (about 80 per cent market share). Nokia's design centre basically aims at anticipating trends and designs of mobile users across the country.
The new initiative makes sense, as the company expects about 50 per cent of its sales to come from the Asia-Pacific region, including India and China.
Nokia has a manufacturing unit in Chennai with a capacity of 20 million handsets a year.
The centre is expected to have talented manpower to anticipate trends, designs and requirements of the country and emerging markets.
Handsets of Nokia are designed globally, but slight changes can be made to meet the requirements of the specific market. For example, Nokia 1100 with dust-resistant and torch facility were designed by keeping the Indian consumers in mind.
The company has, however, not yet finalised the strength or the size of the centre. She added that the global centres for design centre will be London and Espo in Finalnd.
On the importance of India as a market, Nokia CEO and President Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said, "By 2010, there will be 4 billion mobile subscribers in the world.
More than half of the subscribers will come from the Asia-Pacific region, including China and India. the Indian market is just warming up."
In November, the country's GSM operators entered the 100 million subscribers league -- the third country to do so. The Indian telecom industry's monthly subscriber addition of new mobile users is around 7 million.
Currently, India has about 136 million mobile subscribers, but the telephone penetration is about 16 per cent only.
He added that the replacement is also growing the market and it accounts for 65 per cent and is expected to rise to 90 per cent by 2010.
Nokia will focus on both new and replacement or upgraded market to maintain its leadership in the Asia-Pacific region, including India.
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