China Wireless Technologies - global operations and help us enter European and American markets

The tablet market is set to heat up, come November. Coolpad Communications Pvt Ltd, an arm of China Wireless Technologies, is planning to launch in India a tablet which would be cheaper than anything available in the Indian market now. "Tablets would be coming by November, and we plan to price it aggressively, even below Rs 13,000 at which Reliance is selling now. We have just launched it in Indonesia last month in collaboration with a local service operator," Sami Al Lawati, managing director of Coolpad Communications told DNA. Coolpad Communications was created in 2009 as an exclusive distribution agreement for with Reliance Webstore Ltd. China Wireless, which is one of the world's first and largest manufacturers of dual-mode handset (CDMA and GSM) brands, retails handsets under Coolpad brand. China Wireless would firm up its plans to set up a research and development facility in India by March-April, which would come up at an investment of `100 crore and employ 300 professionals. It now has one R&D unit, in Shenzhen, employing about 2,000 professionals and the Indian facility would be a base to venture into the European and US market beyond China and Southeast Asia that it currently caters to.

"For us India represents the factory for brains and that has made us decide on creating our own research and development facility here, which we will use for all of our global operations and help us enter European and American markets. And then many be a manufacturing facility in 3-4 years," Al Lawati said on the sidelines of the launch of its fully-loaded android CDMA phone. The investment would be made by China Wireless and not by the Indian arm Coolpad Communications as the research would be carried out for global markets. The research facility would be working mainly on the Android platform for the future smart phones, he said. China Wireless sees itself has a developer of break-through smart phones and not seller of mass-market phones. "We specialise in high-end phones. In China we sell around 360,000 units at an average selling price of around `12,000 while our competitors like Samsung and Nokia sell for `3,000-4,000 a unit," Lawati said. Its stress on research has been paying off well as seen in the growth of its 3G smartphones. China Wireless's turnover in the first half of 2011 (January-June) has risen 44% with sale of 3G smart phones reaching 44,33,000 units up from 14,20,000 units in the corresponding period of 2010 as it moved away from developing 2G smartphones.