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Used cell phone market booms

Dealers and distributors operating in the territorial telecom circles say that the secondhand market is well established now.

T O D A Y

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The reason, they say, lies in the lower buying capacity of people living in small and medium towns.

The source of these phones, at least for the northern market, is New Delhi itself. The capital is one of the top cellular markets in the country where, in the past one year, exchange offers have become common.

City dealers collect exchange handsets, refurbish and sell them to dealers outside the metros. Deepak Saxena, the deputy general manager-sales at Escotel Mobile's Panipat office, has been quoted as saying that "Typically, the sale is made on very low margins of Rs 100-200.'' The cost to the consumer is, therefore, very low.

Phillips' Fizz, a model that was launched less than two years ago, is among the cheapest handsets in the secondhand market. These sets are particularly popular in rural areas and it is estimated that they make up for 30-40 per cent of the handsets in Haryana.

Curiously enough, advanced, feature-rich handsets are also visible in the prosperous Haryana-Punjab belt.

The latest Panasonic, Nokia and Siemens models can be found with many people but operators say that most of the high-end phones emerge from the grey market.

Affordable cellular handsets have rendered pagers obsolete in some of these markets, say distributors of these services.

Panipat-based Dinesh Kumar, promoter of Victory Enterprises, is a dealer for both a cell phone service as well as a paging operator.

"The two-way facility of the cellular wins over the pager every time,'' he said. Besides at Rs 1,500, there is no great cost difference.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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