Motorola to boost market share

Motorola to boost market share

P.C. Naommy, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Motorola is striving to boost its market share in this country by
launching a series of new cellular phone products, according to a
senior official of Motorola's local office.

PT Motorola Indonesia's operations manager Agus Pranata said
on Monday that the company would launch five new models: Motorola
C550, A760, V868, V690 and MPx200.

"We always try to increase our market share by innovating in
technology and marketing strategy," said Agus, adding that he
hoped the new products and strategy could raise Motorola's sales
in Indonesia by between 20 percent to 30 percent this year. He
declined to provide further data on the Indonesian market.

Over the past few years, since sales fell by 60 percent in
1999, Motorola held only 8 percent of the total market share in
Southeast Asia, but had 18 percent of the global market share.

To widen the company's market share and meet consumers' budget
needs, Motorola has split their products into three price
categories, the high-end with prices of Rp 5 million (US$588) and
up; mid-range, with the prices between Rp 2 million and Rp 3
million; and low-end, with prices Rp 2 million or less.

"These days, the biggest market volume is attained in the low-
end category, thus we have enhanced that with attractive
features," said Agus, pointing out that Motorola's new C550
series which would enter the market next week.

The C550 handset is equipped with polyphonic ringtones, an
integrated camera of good quality and an Internet-accessible
facility.

For the Third Generation (3-G) folks, Motorola has provided
the low-end C131 series -- to enter the market in March this year
-- and will operate with a CDMA (code multiple division access),
using a bandwidth frequency of 800 Mhz and supported with a RUIM
card (removable user identity module-card), a kind of SIM card
used in GSM (global system for mobile communications).

With this low-end series, consumers can have a GSM cellular
phone with the data capacity of up to 350 Kbps (Kilobytes per
second).