Electronic manufacturer Dixon Technologies on Tuesday said it has won a large order from Reliance Jio to manufacture 15 million Jio Bharat Phones.
Of the 15 million, Dixon has already delivered 1 million Jio Phones, it said.
“This business (feature phones) looks very healthy. It’s almost a Rs 1,500 crore business for us in the current fiscal and the commercial production has already started,” said Atul Lall, vice-chairman and managing director at Dixon Technologies.
Jio, earlier this month launched its 4G feature phone at Rs 999, for which it has started the beta trial in association with Karbonn. The company has opened the scope for hardware and design for its new feature phones, in order to enable local handset makers like Dixon to develop feature phones as contract manufacturers of Jio Bharat phones. For Dixon, manufacturing of Jio Bharat phones will also help it get benefits under smartphone production-linked incentive scheme, industry executives said.
For Dixon, the mobile segment which includes manufacturing of feature and smartphones grew 6% on year to Rs 1,387 crore in April-June, according to analysts estimates.
The growth in the mobile segment in April-June has come on the back of an increase in the feature phone segment. Going forward from the October-December quarter, owing to ramp up of production of JioBharat phones, Motorola phones, Xiaomi, as well as Nokia phones, the overall mobile segment will see good growth, Lall said.
Apart from Jio, the company also onboarded Chinese handset maker itel. Lall said, Dixon has already commenced production for itel feature phones at 1 million units per month and will also commence production of its smartphones from September onwards.
Further, with regard to Xiaomi, Dixon is looking to start production of about 0.5 million smartphones a month from September or early October. The contract manufacturer will then ramp up the production phase wise to 1 million units a month, Lall said.
On the volumes of smartphones, currently Samsung is one of the largest contributor for Dixon. In the April-June quarter, the company produced 2 million units of Samsung smartphones.
With regard to the overall volumes outside Samsung, Dixon manufactured 3.4 million units during the quarter. The company said the volumes of its mobile business is looking positive.
Dixon is also looking to apply under the revamped IT hardware PLI scheme.
