New Delhi, July 5: Motorola has drawn up special plans to bridge the gap with market leader Nokia by ramping up sales of mobile phones and other personal communications products.

It aims to focus on markets like Calcutta and a few other cities which have witnessed strong growth in the legitimate market for mobile phones with customers turning away from the grey market.

The company will soon undertake a series of initiatives in four major cities.

To start with, it will launch a campaign by next month with the focus on providing the accessibility to the consumers to use and feel the latest products from Motorola.

India is among the most important market for Motorola, said U. Narendra Nayak, country operations manager India (personal communications) of Motorola India Pvt Ltd.

“We are focusing on four areas to increase our market share in India — growing our internal team, strengthening our product portfolio, investing in building the Motorola brand and growing our distribution channel,” he said.

“In the first phase, the company has identified Calcutta, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi to start its ‘MyMoto’ campaign for retail stores. Eastern India is one of the key markets for Motorola. We have a high success rate in Calcutta where we have grown by about 300 per cent last year,” said Nayak.

“We have identified these four cities as special target points for the campaign. Our experts will be available at the retail stores with phones and personal communication products to demonstrate services based on latest technologies like general packet radio switching. They will also demonstrate downloading of ringtones and multi-media messaging and other value added services,” he added.

“In the second phase, we will be adding more cities. This is one of the measures to improve our market share and to become the market leader in the country,” said Nayak.

Commenting on the problem of grey market in mobile phones, Nayak said the mobile phone manufacturers have brought down the price and the consumers in many parts of the country have shown a major shift towards purchasing the handsets with receipts.

“Calcutta has shown the path in shifting rapidly towards the legitimate market. Before the budget this year, 80 per cent of the phones were from the gray market. Calcutta has shown a remarkable shift from 20 per cent legitimate market to 60 per cent with the gray market share also dipping at the same time,” said Nayak.

”Delhi and Calcutta were the leaders in gray market but now they have shown a major shift towards genuine products. This is more due to the change in consumer behaviour and the attitude for legitimate products that has been responsible for the trend,” he added.