Home-grown mobile phone player Celkon is foraying into televisions and set-top boxes.

Telangana IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao will formally launch the product in a week or two. The firm is investing about ₹100 crore on two manufacturing facilities at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh and the Fab City in Hyderabad that will produce phones, TVs and other products.

While the Tirupati facility will be ready by the year-end, the Fab City unit will be functional by March 2017, Celkon Mobiles Chairman and Managing Director Y Guru told BusinessLine .

Each facility will have a capacity to produce 10 lakh pieces a month. “But we will go for a production of five lakh phones each to start with. We will use the same facilities to produce TVs, set-top boxes, power banks and power chargers,” he said.

Celkon, which began to produce phones in India in June 2015, is now producing five lakh phones that it sells a month. It signed an agreement with a Chinese company for its TV foray. The firm will bring in technologies to produce TVs for the Indian partner.

4G phones

Seeing a spurt in the demand for 4G phones, the firm launched two 4G phones under the ₹5,000 price category. While the Diamond Ace priced at ₹4,999, the Diamond Pop is sold at ₹4,699. Both comes with a free Jio SIM. “With this, we have four models in this category. We are going to launch two more 4G phones in December,” he said.

“There is a huge demand for 4G phones as the consumers are graduating to this segment from 3G phones,” he said.

Specifications

The 5-inch Ace model comes with flo User Interface, Android 5.1 Lollipop and 1,3 GHz quad core Cortex A7 processor. With a 1-GB RAM and 8-GB ROM, the phone memory can be expanded by 32 GB. There is a 5 MP rear camera and 3.2 MP front camera in the dual-SIM phone.

The second phone comes with the scratch and crack resistant Dragontrail Glass. The 4.5-inch phone provide most of the other features in the first model.

comment COMMENT NOW