With smartphones fast becoming more affordable, Taiwanese handset manufacturers are gearing up to expand their presence in emerging markets such as India and China.
HTC Corp (宏達電), the nation’s leading smartphone maker, said it hopes to see a 20 to 30 percent quarterly increase in shipments to China and an unspecified but significant increase in shipments to India in the fourth quarter this year.
India HTC vice president Faisal Siddiqui said India is among the top five fastest growing regions for the company.
“In the last six months we have seen significant growth in India. We launched five devices in the same period and they have seen a phenomenal response from Indian users. This gives us the confidence to double our market share in the next 12 to 18 months,” he said.
The phone maker will launch two models in India soon — the Desire 816G, a cheaper version of its Desire 816 mid-tier model, this month, and its 64-bit Desire 820 in November.
HTC chief financial officer Chang Chia-lin (張嘉臨) said the company currently holds about a 5 percent share of India’s smartphone market and is expected to increase that to 7 percent by the end of this year and 10 percent next year.
Meanwhile, Taiwanese PC vendor Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) will see a 50 percent rise in smartphone shipments to India from next week on strong demand, according to company insiders.
They said that since the Asus ZenFone series entered the Indian market in July, shops there have been frequently selling out of their stocks of the smartphone.
Asustek is also eyeing markets in Brazil, Russia and China, and has estimated that its global smartphone shipments for 2014 will total 8 million units.
The Topology Research Institute has projected that global smartphone shipments for next year will hit 1.47 billion units, up 14.79 percent from 1.28 billion units this year.
Shares of HTC jumped 2.33 percent to NT$131.5 on Friday after the company appointed David Chen (陳文俊) as the company’s new chief operating official, while the stock price of Asustek rallied 2.2 percent to NT$301.5.
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