The smartphone OEMs have started considering India as one of the hubs that could be leveraged for manufacturing smartphones and more and more companies are announcing their plans to do so these days. HTC is the latest OEM to join the "Make In India" brigade. It joined hands with Global Devices Network about three months ago to setup a manufacturing and assembling unit in Noida. The company was going to manufacture handsets for HTC under contract manufacturing and it seems like that the trial production has already commenced.
The commercial production will commence by mid-July. HTC is going in for this move to help it price its smartphones better. HTC has been struggling in the smartphone sales arena and it would be betting on better priced smartphones to help it gain a strong foothold in the budget segment. HTC will be making use of quality control measures at the facility to have the smartphones produced in accordance with the global standards.
HTC’s Desire series of smartphones is the one which caters to the bulk of the sales (sub Rs 25,000 segments) and these will be the one that will be manufactured at the facility. The high end smartphones under the HTC One series won’t be manufactured here.
HTC is following the contract manufacturing mechanism for making smartphones in Taiwan and China already and now plans on going forth with the same model in India as well. HTC isn’t the first one to do so and the likes of Xiaomi, Microsoft, LG, Micromax, Motorola, Lenovo, Asus and Sony are already evaluating manufacturing their smartphones in the country.
