 "Noida becomes hub for mobile phone makers' offices, R&D centres")
Noida is becoming a hub for smartphone makers to set up their offices and R&D centres, with India turning out to to be a sweet spot for them.
While the city was a home for assembly and manufacturing facilities, a number of mobile makers are now putting up offices along with research and development units in the area.
India, which is the fastest growing smartphone market globally, is expected to overtake the US as the second-largest smartphone market next year, according to a recent Morgan Stanley research report. Another recent report by Assocham and KPMG said India is likely to have a total number of 180 million smartphones by 2019, claiming 13.5% of total global smartphone market.
The country is seeing a robust growth in the smartphone brands entering and setting up operations and manufacturing bases.
Chinese mobile manufacturer Vivo Mobile leased 250, 000 sq ft area in World Trade Centre at Greater Noida, to set up its office, R&D and manufacturing unit in second quarter of this calendar year, according to the US based real estate services firm Colliers International.
Another Chinese smartphone brand Oppo Mobile leased 160,000 sq ft in Noida, while homegrown mobile company Lava, which recently inaugurated its second facility in the region, took up another 100,000 sq ft of office space there, as per the data collated by Colliers.
"Lava's corporate office has been established in Noida and all the national operations are being managed from there," said Sanjeev Agarwal, chief manufacturing officer, Lava International. "Moreover, the testing team at Lava is based out of the national headquarters."
More From This Section
While Lava has a repair factory based out of Noida, the company is in process of establishing a R&D facility in the vicinity, he added.
Companies like to remain in the vicinity of other vendors to leverage common component suppliers and economies of scale sometimes, Colliers said in a recent report.
Sky Li, Oppo Global vice president, MD of International Mobile Business and President of Oppo India says Noida has become a hub for smartphone companies given the space and the feasibility.
Oppo, which has set up an assembly unit and plans to build SMT (surface-mount technology) factory in Noida, is looking to hire close to 1, 000 employees this year for its factory in Noida, said Li.
Similarly, Gionee has plans to set up its R&D facility in India by the first quarter of 2017 in the Delhi NCR region since the company is headquartered in Delhi.
According to Vishal Tripathi, research director at Gartner, the proximity to NCR could be one of the reasons, because then companies have the talent pool available which they can tap.
"Also, since there are smartphone companies manufacturing in the region, which makes the area familiar," he said. "Now that the couple of these companies have set up their offices and R&D facilities in Noida, others will follow the suit."
At present there are 25 handset makers, which have started production in India, while 37 new mobile phone manufacturing units have come up creating 37,500 new jobs, said Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad earlier this week.
Ashok Kumar, Principal and managing director, Gennex partners, a realty services firm said ever since the Centre introduced a 10.5 per cent duty differential between imported devices and those made locally in last year's budget, the region has become India's biggest smartphone hub .
"The flurry of investments to the region was perhaps prompted by the presence of Korean giants Samsung and LG , which started local manufacturing a decade ago but now followed by other Korean, Chinese , Taiwan and even local mobile companies," Kumar said.
As per the data collated by industry lobby Indian Cellular Association, the value of mobile phones made in India is likely to touch Rs 94,000 crore in the current fiscal from Rs. 54,000 crore in 2015-16.
Source--Colliers International