Samsung to build mobile battery, display plants in India

South Korea’s tech giant Samsung is making additional investments in India with the goal of making the 1.3 billion-population market its mobile business hub, according to industry and news reports Thursday.

Samsung Electronics battery affiliate Samsung SDI and display panel maker Samsung Display recently invested around 25 billion rupees ($357.83 million) to build additional battery pack and mobile display assembly plants, according to local news outlets.

The detailed amount of their respective investment could not be confirmed by their head offices in Korea.

Both Samsung affiliates said they were making investments, but that the amounts had not yet been finalized. 

Samsung completed a 49 billion-rupee smartphone factory in Noida last July, ramping up the Korean company’s monthly production capacity from 5 million units to 10 million.

Samsung is aggressively expanding its operations in India in order to overtake its Chinese rival Xiaomi and gain the lead in the Indian smartphone market, after losing out to Xiaomi in China for the past couple of years.

In the first quarter of this year, Xiaomi shipped out 9.6 million smartphones in India, accounting for 30.1 percent of the market, according to data from Strategy Analytics. Samsung came in second with a 22.7 percent market share, shipping out 7.2 million smartphones.

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)