Godrej Appliances, the flagship division of the $3-billion Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co Limited, on Friday entered the Indian colour television market, the largest business in the durable sector, by launching its EON range of XLCDs.
With this, Godrej becomes a full line consumer durable player and will now be representing 88 per cent (including 44 per cent of CTV) of the total durable market in the country.
Announcing this at a press conference here, Kamal Nandi, vice-president (sales and marketing), Godrej Appliances, said the market was now more skewed towards high-end televisions — flat and LCDs constituting 67 per cent and 4 per cent market share respectively.
"In a research conducted by the company, 60 per cent of the consumers were willing to consider a Godrej TV," he added.
The company had spent Rs 150 crore on research and development and infrastructure for its CTV products.
“The CTV market in India is currently pegged at 10.5 million units, which is expected to touch 14.7 million units by 2010. There are no strong Indian brands in the high-end CTV space and we would like to occupy this space," Nandi said.
With the first phase of launch from Andhra Pradesh, the company expects to sell 100,000 units and is eyeing a 10 per cent share of the Rs 9,000-crore market though a pan-India roll out in phases in the next six to seven months.
According to George Menezes, chief operating officer of Godrej & Boyce, the company has put a back-end partnership in place with a European company, which is currently producing its TVs.
"There are a lot of cost-effective benefits from this tie up. We don’t have any plans to set up a manufacturing facility in India for our TV products and will continue with the current economically-viable route," he said.
The EON range comes with the Intelligent Processing for Image Xcellence (iPIX) technology that is similar to the one used by remote sensing satellites to receive input signals and cleans them by reducing video noise levels thereby improving sharpness and clarity.
The price ranges from Rs 6,500 to Rs 70,000.
Nandi said the company's next natural progression would be to get into mobile, laptops and Internet protocol television (IPTV) segments.
“The proposal, however, is not even in the conceptual stage now,” he said.
