New Delhi: The world's leading software
firm Microsoft is now focussing on the fast growing
smartphones market in India after the netbooks segment-- a new
category created to brigde the gap between mobiles and
laptops-- received lukewarm response from buyers.
"We have heavily invested in that space and will continue
to do so. It is still a very competitive space," Microsoft
Corporate Vice President (OEM Division) Steve Guggenheimer
told a news agency.
Smartphones, high-powered mobiles with computer
functionalities and big screen, constitute less than 10 per
cent of total cellphone market in India.
According to industry estimates, out of the 130 million
devices likely to be sold in 2009-2010 only six million would
be smartphones. Out of the six million, only 2.5 lakh phones
run on Microsoft's operating system.
Guggenheimer said, Microsoft works with several mobile
handset manufacturers like Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG and Samsung
except Nokia, which uses Symbian operating system.
Although Microsoft's Windows-based smartphones have come
up in the past few years, they face stiff competition from the
likes of Nokia, which uses Symbian OS and Blackberry.
The competition got hotter with the entry of Apple
mobiles and Google's recently launched OS, Android, not to
talk of spread of mailing device Blackberry.
"That (smartphone) market will continue to move and shake
and do a lot other things," he added.
Pankaj Mohindroo, President of Indian Cellular
Association said that while the overall handset market is
expected to grow by 15-30 percent, the market for smartphone
is expected to grow by over 50 percent.
The government and the IT industry, have been pushing
hard to increase the broadband penetration to reach education
and healthcare to villages but without much success.
The cellular market, on the other hand, has seen addition
of over 15 million wireless subscribers a month, although a
lot of them use entry level phones that are used mainly for
voice calls and have smaller screens.
Among the many efforts by the industry and the government
has been to come with computing devices like the Netbook,
which would be less expensive.
Guggenheimer said however that Microsoft is not looking at
pushing any one category. "We provide nice building blocks
(for computing). We don't spend our own marketing money to
create a category," he added.
"We tried creating catagories before the MSN companion,
we created the tablet PCs. Catagory creations are hard. It
costs a lot of money and so we will provide the softwrae to
enable people to create a catagory," Guggenheimer said.
PTI