Elcoteq opens

Elcoteq sets up shop in Bangalore
Deccan Herald

Finland-based Elcoteq, a leading European electronic equipment and mobile handset maker, has set up a manufacturing facility in Bangalore, in which it will invest $100 million and employ 1,000 people by 2006.

The three-billion euro company, which makes mobile phones and devices, has become the first global mobile GSM-based handset manufacturing in India, one of the world’s fastest growing markets.

Briefing reporters after the inaugural of Elcoteq’s facility here on Monday, President & CEO Jouni Hartikainen said the company would invest between $50 million and $100 million apart from employing about 1,000 people in the unit when it becomes fully operational by 2006.
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The facility will provide employment to over 2,500 people, directly or indirectly besides reducing of cost GSM products. He said the company had set up the manufacturing unit in just nine months and had a capacity to produce 10 million handsets every year. Elcoteq plans to sell 80 per cent of the handsets produced here in the domestic market.

Mr Hartikainen said besides mobile handsets, the company would manufacture other telecom network products, which generates good chunk of its total revenues, in Bangalore.

Elcoteq would eventually use India as a base to export mobile phones and base stations for Pakistan, Bangladesh, West Asia and East Africa. The firm would work on design, fabrication and packaging of mobile units and other products in the telecom space, while it was already “outsourcing design and software work to several software firms in India”, he said.