China-made mobile phones help Bangladesh telecom boom

A couple of years earlier, Abdul Hamid never thought that one day he could afford to buy a mobile handset. Hamid, a rickshaw-puller in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka, is now not only buying a mobile handset for himself but also for his wife who lives in a rural village in Bangladesh where 31 percent of about 153 million people still live below the national poverty line. "I want to buy two low-cost China-made handsets for which I get one year warranty," said Hamid who came to an electronics store in a posh city market with his friend Abdul Motaleb. "Last year my friend Motaleb bought a Chinese handset for 1,500 taka (about 19 U.S. dollars). Then I told him that your handset would develop technical glitches after a few months and would be useless. But I was wrong since the handset is still working. Many of my friends also bought cheap Chinese mobile phones and they are still working well," Hamid said. "Recently my friend Motaleb told me that I can now buy a Chinese- madeSymphony handset at a low price of 1,050 taka (over 13 U.S. dollars). So I will buy one for my wife. I hope she and our children would be very happy to have a mobile phone for the first time," he added. Importers and traders are saying that Bangladesh consumers prefer to buy low-cost Chinese brand rather than the more expensive Korean or Western brands. China-made mobile phones-- Symphony, Maximus, Sprint, Digital, I- Max, etc -- have now earned a good name in Bangladesh market, accounting for about 90 percent of monthly sales volume, they say. According to them, sales of low-priced Chinese original brands have posed a threat to the domination of leading global mobile brands. They said that brand giants such as Nokia and Samsung which dominated the Bangladesh market for many years are now facing challenges from known and little known Chinese brands. Mobile phone sellers say low-end users have less interest in known global brands which sell for double the prices of Chinese sets but have less features. They say such users feel comfortable as importers give a year's warranty for Chinese-made brands. Tofael Ahmed, proprietor of a store named Nokia Telecom in Dhaka 's Eastern Plaza Shopping Complex, said there is more demand now for low-priced Chinese-made mobiles than leading global brands. Industry leaders said that it would not be exaggeration to say that China-made handsets now help ordinary Bangladeshis, even rickshaw-pullers and day laborers, to have mobile phones. Even if Chinese handsets are relatively cheaper but they are of high quality and durable, they added.

"Chinese handsets are contributing a lot to the growth of Bangladesh telecom market," Faisal Alim, general secretary of the Mobile Handset Importers Association of Bangladesh, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

Failsal said that just like in any other country, mobile phone in Bangladesh is now more of a necessity than a luxury.

He said that the quality and durability of Symphony, Maximus, Micromax, Sfone, King mobile, Walton, Smart and Strawbery, which are all made in China, can now compared with known global brands. Echoing a similar view, Mosharraf Hossain Ahmed, who has been using a 30-32 China-made mobile handset since 2008, said more Bangladesh people, particularly the youths, are now being attracted to android smart-phones from China.

He said prices of mobile handsets will further plunge if Chinese manufacturers can set up plants in Bangladesh. On an average there are 1.5 million new mobile connections in Bangladesh every month. According to the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, mobile phone subscribers reached more than 109.349 million at the end of August with about 12 million new users in the first eight months of this year.

According to Bangladesh's Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC), the number of subscribers of the country's six cell-phone operators -- Grameenphone, Banglalink, Robi, Airtel, Citycell, Teletalk -- at the end of August stood at 45.267 million, 27.694 million, 24.966 million, 7.969 million, 1. 338 million, and 2.117 million respectively.

Md Munir Hasan, Grameenphone's director for strategy and planning, said that handset price, like other developing markets, plays a vital role for any mobile operators to increase its subscriber base. "Availability of low cost handset definitely has played an important role to increase the sub- base which otherwise would have not been possible," he said. He said that competition from vendors actually forced the reputed brands to introduce low-cost handsets.

"So both the cheap handsets and the low-cost branded handsets have played significant role in increasing the mobile penetration in the country," Hasan said. Bangladesh currently imports about 18 to 20 million handsets every year. Over 10 percent of these sets are 3G-enabled. As Bangladesh last month entered the third generation mobile broadband, industry leaders expect sales of about 300,000 3G- enabled mobile handsets every month in which China manufacturers have a good market share.