Idea Cellular is expecting a huge surge in the usage of 3G services in India and plans to launch its own branded smartphones.
“In India the process of Internet being a part of Indian population daily life has just begun with only 50 million active users. In contrast, India surprised the world and emerged as the fastest-growing mobile market with globally second-largest mobile user base,” the company said in a conference call with analysts. “It is inevitable that these 860 million mobile phones, primarily voice and text devices, will ultimately be replaced with a new smartphone.”
The study on the pace of 2G mobile adoptions suggests India lags behind global trends by four to six years but will converge and falls in line with the world order. Similar pattern will follow for Internet adoption, Idea Managing Director Himanshu Kapania told analysts.
“The initial process of adoption will be a trickle and will only turn into a tsunami only when these devices become affordable for the mass market as well as relevance of internet access through these smartphone,” Kapania said.
With its branded smartphones, Idea Cellular wants to repeat the success of its Idea-branded 3G dongles. Idea smartphones would run on Google’s Android operating system and be made available at affordable prices, the company said.
“Smartphone prices needs to be brought down. We believe that we have a role to play in that,” Kapania said. “That is why Idea is in the process of launching the Idea-branded smartphone, which would be on Android operating system. It will be a full-feature phone and which will have all relevant software built in to it. We believe getting our handsets will help the market to bring down the prices of smartphone in the country and make it affordable for the customers to accelerate the process from replacing their 2G handsets with the 3G handsets.”
India is on the cusp of the new age digital lifestyle, the company said, and its 3G high-speed wireless broadband services for mobile phone users will help accelerate the change.
