South Korean electronics giant LG, has invested Sh3.6 billion to gain a foothold for their premium mobile phone handsets in East Africa.
This is part of its push into emerging markets as it consolidates plans to corner 15 per cent of the global market sales for handsets.
Nokia remains the leader with 41 per cent of global sales. “We want to become a firm top three player by 2010, and become n umber one eventually,” Scott Ahn, president of LG’s mobile communications division, told the Financial Times in August.
The company also wants to outsource more manufacturing for its best-selling brands beyond the current five per cent.
LG’s Nairobi Liaison Office General Manager, Byung Su Lee, told Tech.Insight that the $50 million would be used to import the company’s range of premium mobile handsets and to create awareness through marketing.
“As you know, the Eastern Africa regions is one of the emerging mobile phone markets and LG has started to give a very big focus to the region,” said Lee.
Premium
Lee was speaking at the launch of the company’s premium medium handset, the LG-KF510 at the Nairobi Intercontinental Hotel last week.
LG is predicted to overtake Motorola as the third-largest 3-G handset maker this year, after Nokia and Samsung Electronics in that order, mainly due to its sleek multi-media phones.
rival brands
Byung said the LG-KF510 handset incorporates technology that enables it save battery power longer than most rival brands in the same class.
The company has earmarked Sh145 million for marketing in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda.
Lee said the company has projected to increase its sales in these markets by over 50 per cent, from over 500,000 handsets sold last year, to at least a million by 2009.
The marketing is expected to level the challenge paused by cheap and low quality handsets from the Far East markets, which have saturated the region.
“We shall do this by continuing to position LG phones at the premium level with its entire product range of premium low, premium medium and premium high handsets,” said Lee.
Lee said the handset reflects the trend in the mobile market industry, where manufacturers are including features which drain batteries like LCD colour screens for browsing the Internet and watching videos.
“The longer lasting battery power allows for more convenient use of the high technology features, like camera’s MP3 players, radio, and video players,” said Mr Anthony Hutia, the company’s GSM/CDMA Regional Marketing Manager.
East African Standard
