The Hindu Business Line : SanDisk bets big on mobiles

Last year, around 80 million mobile handsets were sold in India, and of this 28 per cent had flash memory slots, according to Ms Manish Sood, Country Head, India & SAARC, SanDisk Corporation.

This year, around 100 million mobile handsets are likely to be sold. With mobile handsets now available with voice, data and movie features, the demand for memory cards will increase.

By 2011, around 80 per cent of the mobile phones will have memory slots, she told Business Line.

With a high capacity memory card in their mobile phone slots, consumers can do more with their mobile devices - be it storing more music, listening to more songs and/or saving more videos, photos, maps, ringtones and games.

For example, an 8GB memory card can store 1,000 songs, 1,200 photos and 21 hours of video.

SanDisk has a partnership with HCL Infosystems to distribute its mobile phone memory cards in the India.

In partnering with HCL, SanDisk will be able to leverage the IT company’s network in ICT distribution, she said. The USBs (universal serial bus) have become cheaper and of more capacity. For the same price, the capacity of these cards that are fast replacing compact disks has doubled in the last one year.

Costs less

Last year, the entry level flash USB flash drive was 1GB and priced at around Rs 450. However, today, a 2GB card is available for the same price, she said.

With revenues of $3.9 billion in 2007, SanDisk’s products include flash memory cards for mobile phones, digital cameras and camcorders, and USB flash drives.

Around 1.5 million USB flash drive units were sold last year in India. The demand will increase ‘substantially’ this year with consumers using the drives in cars, DVDs (around 30 per cent of DVDs now come with USB drives) and other gadgets, she said.

On complaints that USB flash drives get corrupted easily, Ms Sood said SanDisk’s USB flash drives are pre-loaded with U3 anti-virus software. Now, there is an option to update the anti-virus from the U3 Web site.

On cameras, she said around one million digital cameras were sold last year. For each camera, two memory cards are bought by consumers.

Markets in South

According to Ms Sood, most of the high-end mobile phones are sold highest in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Hence, the memory flash card market is also higher in the region. Similarly, there is a huge market in the South for high-end mega pixel cameras – of 8 to 10 mega pixel category. There is no official data available on the market size, she said.

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