The Hindu Business Line : Nokia's plant produces 1 m handsets

GETTING CONNECTED: (From right) Mr Matti Vanhanen, Prime Minister of Finland, Mr Jorma Ollila, Chairman and CEO, Nokia, and Mr Surjit Singh Barnala, Governor of Tamil Nadu, at the inauguration of Nokia's Sriperumbudur facility near Chennai on Saturday. — Bijoy Ghosh

Chennai , March 11

Nokia, the Finnish telecom equipment manufacturer, has manufactured about a million mobile handsets in two months at its plant at Sriperumbudur, about 50 km west of Chennai. It hopes operations at the plant, which was inaugurated on Saturday, will stabilise by this year end by which time production will also substantially increase.

Nokia officials, who addressed the press after the inauguration, however, declined to provide details about the plant's capacity. The Chennai plant would manufacture high volume, low and mid-range phones for GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication), a mobile technology. Some of the models that will be made here are the 1100, 1108 and 1600 handsets.

Mr Robert Andersson, Executive Vice-President - Customer and Market Operations and Member of the Nokia group executive board, and Mr Jukka Lehtela, Director - India Operations, Nokia, said that the Chennai plant would serve the Indian and export markets. It now employed about 1,100 people, which would go up to 2,000 by year-end.

In 2005, Nokia globally supplied about 265 million handsets from nine plants, which works out to about 30 million handsets from each plant.

In an interaction with Business Line later, Mr Andersson explained that this figure gave an idea of the capacity that could be achieved at the Chennai plant. He expected the plant's operations to stabilise by the end of 2006.

Mr Andersson and Mr Lehtela said the Chennai plant would manufacture GSM handsets only. The plant could manufacture CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) handsets, another mobile technology, they said, and added that, however, there were no plans for the moment to manufacture CDMA handsets.

At the inauguration, Mr Matti Vanhanen, Finland's Prime Minister, said Nokia was an icon of Finnish information society and for the global outreach of Finnish enterprises. That the Chennai plant was built in a record time was a fitting example of the good co-operation between Finland and India, he said.

Mr Jorma Ollila, Chairman and CEO, Nokia, pointed out that it had taken only 23 weeks from the time the company started construction to rolling out the first products at the plant, its 10th manufacturing facility globally for mobile handsets.

Nokia will invest $150 million (about Rs 650 crore) over three years in the plant, which is spread over 210 acres. The manufacturing facility is spread over 29,000 sq. m. It will manufacture mobile handsets and base station controllers.

The first base station controllers will be shipped out of the plant shortly, according to Mr Lehtela. Commercial production of handsets began on January 2 and within two months the plant has produced a million handsets.

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