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Seoul (pte036/27.01.2005/15:00) - Mobile phone manufacturer LG Electronics http://www.lgelectronics.com has announced that it has begun operations at its mobile phone production facility in India. As the Korea Times http://times.hankooki.com reports, the company has said it kicked off production of the European standard GSM (global system for mobile communications) mobile handsets at its Ranjangaon plant on January the 15th. The move makes MLG Electronics the first top-tier mobile phone supplier to set up a mobile handset assembly line in the world's second most populous nation. The Indian plant will turn out 80,000 units of mobile handsets a month.
"We will boost monthly production capacity to two million units by the year's end," said Cho Joong-kwon, a senior manager of LG Electronics' public relations team. According to Cho, the production capacity of the Indian plant will reach 20 million units by 2010. This would place LG second only to Nokia in the Indian GSM market, with Samsung and Motorola slipping behind. Although the Ranjangaon plant has started with just two models - the G1600 and G1100, the company plans to manufacture the whole array of GSM handsets at its Indian facility in the future. According to Cho, LG Electronics has no plan to produce CDMA (code division multiple access) handsets at the Indian plant right now, but it could be a possibility in the future.
Last year, LG invested a huge 43 million dollars into the construction of the Indian GSM assembly line. Although the penetration ratio of mobile phones in India stands at only four per cent, the number of subscribers has already hit 45 million, with an average of 1.6 million new customers signing up for mobile communication services each month. It is expected that the number of mobile users in India, which has a population of 1.1 billion people, will hit 100 million by 2006 and 200 million by 2008.
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