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Cellphone makers ready for New Year

Cellphone maker Motorola Inc and its Taiwanese rivals plan to pitch new models into the local market, aiming to boost sales during the Lunar New Year shopping season, company officials said yesterday.

"Motorola is scheduled to roll out its new V-series models soon as consumers are more willing to spend after obtaining their year-end bonuses," said Jonathan Hong (洪政煒), a senior marketing promotion specialist at Motorola Electronics Taiwan Ltd.

Motorola's major local rival, BenQ Corp (明基電通), is also set to roll out a color-screen model in mid-December.

"People are becoming less price sensitive nowadays ... Most consumers also prefer to dump their old phones during the year-end shopping season," said Danny Yao (姚鴻洲), director of BenQ's sales department.

BenQ outranked South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co as the third-largest handset brand in Taiwan last quarter, after Nokia and Motorola.

The traditional buying season is expected to bring an additional 30 percent growth in monthly sales over BenQ's slack seasons, Yao said. That growth pace will increase BenQ's December sales to about 110,500 units as the local company sold 85,000 handsets last month.

BenQ also expects handset sales to rise by nearly 72 percent to about 1.2 million units next year from 700,000 units this year due to quickening replacement of monochromatic-screen phones with color-screen phones, Yao said.

Color-screen phones are expected to replace most monochromatic-screen phones within the next three months in mature markets such as Taiwan, industry analysts said.

Local consumers will pay less than NT$1,000 to get a color-screen Motorola phone T266 with a new number from local telecom operators, the company said during the phone's launching late last month.

"In November, we don't see any new models equipped with monochromatic screens," said Chou Chi-shian (周奇賢), an analyst with SinoPac Securities Corp (建華證券).

Monochromatic phones will still appear in the global handset market, as demand remains strong in emerging markets like India, China and Russia, Chou said.

MiTAC International Corp (神達電腦) is also considering launching a second brandname smart phone around the Lunar New Year, said Nicky Wang (王慧華), a project manager of MiTAC.

MiTAC rolled out its first smart phone equipped with Microsoft Windows in June, and sold 40,000 handsets in the five months after the launch.

The company is considering launching its new model in the first quarter of next year.

"As many new mobile phones are expected to be introduced before the Lunar New Year, we try to avoid diverting consumer's attention by arranging a proper date," Wang said.
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