It's there in black and white

Ramesh Kuma, Managing Partner, Tele Zonee @ Coimbatore.

Dear Sir,

The article ''Going grey with gusto'' in eWorld dated October 31 by G. Rambabu raised very valid points.

We are one of the leading mobile phone dealers in Coimbatore district. As stated in the article, the mobile market is beaming as far as the cellular operators are concerned. But the handset market is totally ruled by grey. Genuine dealers like us are not able to survive and we face losses. The official market is totally dry. Let me provide some figures to make my point.

In the first quarter of this fiscal, my small shop's sales were around Rs 18 lakh whereas, in the second quarter, it was just Rs 3 lakh. The sudden price fall in the grey market and the mindset of the operators puts us into the greatest difficulty. There are 20 authorised simcard dealers in Coimbatore. Besides them, there are five neutral dealers like me who deal with only mobile phones and their accessories and not with simcards. The cellular operators are not motivating their dealers or customers to buy things officially. They simply want simcard sales and are not bothered about the genuineness of the handsets or the accessories that their customers buy. The grey market sells the maximum of new handsets. (They run in the name of duty-paid shops).

An official Nokia 5110i phone costs an end-user Rs 6,500 whereas the same phone in the grey market costs only Rs 4,000. A grey market shop is able to sell around 10 to 20 cell-phones on average per day in my city, whereas the official dealer is not able to sell even one cell-phone a day. A genuine dealer has to take into account registration certificate, local sales-tax, etc. But the grey market doesn't issue invoices to the customer. Despite all this, the Government is not taking action. Despite the best efforts I am not able to sell my products. If the situation continues, either genuine dealers are bound to stop doing business or we should also start selling grey products. It's time for some drastic action.

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