Sounds like Booming Royalties and ASIC sales>
Mobile Phones Move Into 3rd Place Among Korean Exports(Update1)
Bloomberg News
Apr 6 1999 12:06AM ET
Mobile Phones Move Into 3rd Place Among Korean Exports(Update1)
(Updates with comments from LG Information and Samsung Electronics; adds background and rewrites throughout.)
Seoul, April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Mobile phones surged into third place among South Korea's exports, as the nation's top cellular phone makers, including LG Information &
Communications Co. and Samsung Electronics Co., stepped up their efforts to grab a share of the market.
In the first two months of 1999, mobile phone exports rose 41 percent from a year earlier to $390 million, exceeding combined exports of color TV sets, microwave ovens, VCRs and
refrigerators and ranked third after semiconductors and liquid crystal displays, the Electronics Industry Association of Korea said.
LG Information & Communications Co., one of Korea's top three cellular phone exporters, said it will hire about 300 people this month, reflecting the company's strategy to focus on
mobile phone exports. The new recruits include researchers and sales people to market the company's handsets in North and South Americas, LG Information said.
''We need to allocate more resources overseas -- this clearly is the place to be,'' said Kim In Gwon, a spokesman for LG Information. ''As a global leader, you can make more
money selling these handsets than selling refrigerators.''
Exports to Triple
Kim said the company expects to triple its mobile phone exports to $350 million this year.
LG has tentatively set an advertising budget of about $6 million to market its products in the U.S. The company is selling its handsets under brand names of AirTouch
Communications Inc. and others, but it hopes to sell them under names of both LG and its providers this year.
Samsung Electronics Co., also one of the nation's top three mobile phone exporters, is aiming to double its exports to $900 million this year, betting on growing markets in Australia,
China and Brazil.
The world's largest memory chipmaker is the official sponsor of mobile phones for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a costly project the company took to step up its exports in Australia.
Samsung's mobile phone exports accounted for 30 percent of its total mobile phone sales last year. It plans to increase that portion to over 40 percent this year.
China Market
Analysts expect the company to benefit from China's move to open its market wider to suppliers of CDMA technology. At present, China's rapidly expanding mobile telephone
market is dominated by the European standard, GSM.
Besides handsets, Samsung provides mobile phone technology based on CDMA or code division multiple access system as well as GSM or global system for mobile
telecommunications.
''We're betting on two things -- CDMA and China,'' said James Chung, a Samsung Electronics spokesman.
Samsung expects subscribers of CDMA-based mobile phones to total 140 million by 2003, accounting for 20 percent of the total global subscribers. They now account for only 7
percent.
Lucent Inc. and Motorola Inc. last week signed contracts valued at about $20 million to expand mobile telephone network in China based on the American CDMA standard.
Hyundai Electronics Industries Co., another major mobile phone exporter, expects its exports to rise to $380 million this year from $7.5 million last year.
Last year, Korea's mobile phone exports increased 68 percent from 1997 to $1.42 billion. |
