"The Pondicherry facility will focus on manufacturing colour monitors and is expected to be completely operational in the next six months," divisional manager (marketing) of Samtel India's multimedia division MS Kohli said here.Most of the manufacturing operations at the Faridabad plant, having annual manufacturing capacity of 3.6 lakh monitors, would be ultimately shifted to the new plant with annual capacity of one million monitors, he said.Kohli, however, declined to give the investment figure earmarked for the facility.

"The new facility would start with about half a million monitors per year and gradually grow to one million by 2002," he said.

With the two facilities operational, Samtel is aiming to sell 3,50,000 monitors in the country next year, of which 40,000 would be monochrome.The company sold about 175,000 monitors in the country in 1999-2000 of which 40,000 were monochrome, Kohli added.

On Samtel's marketing plans, Kohli said that the company plans to garner a sizable share of its monitor sales from the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the coming years.

"Samtel currently has about 30 per cent of its total sales coming from both OEMs and the assembling market. We plan to increase it to about 60 per cent by 2001-02," he said.

For this, Samtel which currently has tie-ups with Indian OEMs like Wipro and HCL would woo the foreign OEMs, he added.

Kohli said that Samtel which currently operates through a network of ten regional offices and 25 service centres across India, now plans to spread itself to B and C class cities.

"We plan to increase our service centres to 50 by mid-2001 by moving to smaller cities and towns across the country," he said.

In addition, the company has tie-ups with about 120 distributors and 1000 resellers in India.

On the financial performance of Samtel's multimedia unit, Kohli said that the division is targeting Rs 175 crore revenue next year as against Rs 85 crore this year.