Motorola and Lenovo start building handsets in India

Lenovo and its Motorola unit are the latest smartphone manufacturers to start building handsets in India. The smartphones are being produced at a factory in Chennai, with contract manufacturer Flextronics being called upon to handle the assembly of the devices. The first phone to be produced at the plant will be the Motorola Moto E. That will be followed by the production of the Lenovo K3 Note.

Motorola and Lenovo plan on building 6 million phones at the factory during this fiscal year. The pair join other smartphone manufacturers building smartphones locally in the country such as Xiaomi. The latter just introduced its first handset made in India, the Xiaomi Redmi 2 Prime. The upstart Chinese manufacturer is teaming up with Foxconn to build the phone in a plant located in Sri City.

Other companies rumored to be thinking about building smartphones in India include Oppo, Asus, Gionee and Huawei. According to reports, Microsoft has spoken with Foxconn about building some Lumia models in India.

Lenovo is not a complete stranger to manufacturing in India. For the last few years, the company has been producing PC units in Indian factories. According to researcher GfK, India will be the largest contributor to global smartphone unit growth this year. A low smartphone penetration combined with plenty of competition (which keeps pricing down) should help drive growth in the Indian smartphone market this year.


source: BGR