Chennai: The Rs7,500-crore consumer durables major LG Electronics India Private Limited (LGEIL) is planning to increase the colour television output by 20 per cent this year over last year's production of 4 million units.

According to Kwang Ro Kim, managing director, the market trend is in favour of flat screen televisions. "Nearly 60 per cent of the television purchasers go in for flat screen units and our production too will be in line with that."

Given this position, LG Electronics India is slowly cutting down the production of the conventional colour televisions. The company is bringing down the number of conventional picture tube televisions in tune with the market preference.

Similarly, for its refrigeration products, the company is expanding the range of premium refrigerators; it has launched the 751-litre DIOS model with three doors (two at the top and one at the bottom for the freezer) priced at Rs1.30 lakh. Prior to the launch, the company had only the two-door model and sold around 800 units in 2005.

LGEIL is also increasing the production of mobile phones at its 1-million unit capacity Pune facility. Last year the company sold four lakh CDMA instruments and 12 lakh GSM phones. According to Kim, the target for this year is 30 lakh CDMA units and 50 lakh GSM units.

Towards the target LG has launched four new GSM hand sets of which three are in the high end and the other in mid-price segment) taking its product portfolio to 14 hand set models and plans to add another 18 models this year.

During 2006 the company plans to grow the GSM phone business by 300 per cent to contribute Rs600 crore towards the targeted turnover of Rs9,000 crore. Currently ranking fifth in the cell phone market, the company targets to move to the third position before the end of this year and accordingly is increasing its mobile phone dealer network to 20,000 from 11,000 dealers.

"Around 5,000 GSM phones per month are exported. We ship our phones to countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya and others," said Kim.

Last year the company exported goods worth $140 million and target figure for this year is $200 million by shipping out washing machines, microwave ovens, televisions, computers and other products.

The long term plan to manufacture 33 million DVD writers by 2008 and 10 million mobile phones by 2010 and make the Indian facility a production hub for the Middle East, Africa and CIS countries. The total export by 2010 is targeted to be $1 billion. The company plans to invest around Rs900 crore to jack up the capacity by 2008.

According to Kim, the company has postponed its plans to have a plant in south for another three years. For LG Electronics India, south is a major market contributing around Rs2,000 crore to the total turnover. "Till then we will opt for contract manufacturing in case of any need. We will house our southern plant in Hyderabad or in Chennai."

According to Kim, home appliances, consumer electronics contributed 80 per cent of the turnover and balance 20 per cent is from IT and communication products division.