It was during last fiscal that Samsung finally decided to become a subsidiary. With this development coming, there has been reshuffling in the company. And the communications division has seen changes as well. It decided to leave some peripheral areas of presences (PBX and optical products) and focus on two main lines of businesses—mobile phones and fax.

Samsung has managed to lay claim to being one of the more popular GSM cellular phones in the market. Features that it pioneered in the Indian market includes voice dialling and the champagne gold colour that became an attraction among consumers. It commanded about 10 percent share of the legal GSM mobile handset market, though the marketshare it enjoyed overally including the huge grey market was much higher. Samsung also emerged as a serious contender for the CDMA handset market which began opening up during last fiscal.

In faxes, Samsung performed consitently with sales of this product contributing about Rs 20 crore. It was seen as a major player in the laser segment especially.

The future for this Korean giant looks promising this year as the CDMA phone market is likely to see a major boom. It is also considering playing a role in the infrastructure implementation of the CDMA network.