The Hindu Business Line : Cellular body to rate dealers to tone up customer confidence

THE Indian Cellular Association, the apex body representing the cellular handset manufacturers, dealers and distributors, will shortly come out with a best practices certification for dealers affiliated to it.

This certification will give customers the confidence that everything available in the showroom is genuine - right from the handsets to the accessories, according to Mr Pankaj Mohindroo, President, Indian Cellular Association.

He told a press conference here today that the scheme should roll out in the next two months covering the nearly 14,000 retailers affiliated to the association. This scheme is meant to push legal sales of handsets and accessories, which now nationally accounts for 45 per cent of the mobile handset market against the 55 per cent accounted for by the grey market.

Thanks to sustained campaigns launched by the association, especially with regards to import duties and sales tax levies in the States, the organised sale of handsets had grown substantially bringing in higher revenues to the States, he said.

Mr Mohindroo said that barring a few States such as Kerala, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkand, all others had adopted a uniform floor rate of sales tax of 4 per cent for handsets. This, he said, had resulted in higher revenues for the States as the dealers had passed on the reduction in sales tax to the customers, thus resulting in higher sales through the legal channel.

In Tamil Nadu, for instance, where the sales tax had been reduced from 21 per cent to 4 per cent, the revenue from this source was expected to increase from about Rs 2 crore last year to more than Rs 5 crore this year, he said.

However, the association would like the duties and various levies, including sales tax, to not be more than 10 per cent in all. At present, taxes and levies amounted to almost 20-30 per cent.

Mr Mohindroo said that the legal sales of handsets would be in the region of 5,00,000 a month. This year, the total handset market was expected to be in the region of nine million pieces, up from 4.4 million pieces last year. The Association estimated the total market size this year to be Rs 4,050 crore of which the legal market would account for Rs 1,822.50 crore.

Asked if the members of the association, which included all the major handset manufacturers, would start local manufacture of the handsets, Mr Mohindroo said that this would be possible once the market size reached 20-25 million pieces a year. However, a lot of software development was carried out in the country, he said.

Mr Mohindroo inaugurated the Chennai chapter of the Association, with Mr Jaswant Munoth, Managing Director of Munoth Industries Ltd, as the chairman.

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
Shake-out soon in contact centre biz: Survey

Cellular body to rate dealers to tone up customer confidence

Accel to buy Transmatic

Satyam offloads 1-m Sify shares in pvt placement

Softex Digital photo editor for Siemens mobiles