Calcutta, June 25: Chinese electronics company Lenovo plans to set up another manufacturing plant in India to boost smartphone sales in the country.

the company has a unit in Pondicherry that manufactures the Thinkpad range of laptops. All the other products are imported from China.

"With the Centre's Make in India drive, we are hoping to come up with another manufacturing unit soon which will cater to the needs of the Indian market and Bengal is certainly an area we are looking at," said Bhaskar Choudhuri, director-marketing of Lenovo India.

Lenovo, a leading market player in laptops, personal computers and tablets, is now betting big on smartphones.

Choudhuri said the penetration of smartphones in the country was only 30 per cent last year.

"Because of the low penetration of dial-up Internet facility and landlines in the deeper pockets of the country, a big chunk of the population is switching over to smartphones. Hence, there is enough headroom for growth," he added.

The electronics firm is also expanding its retail presence in the country through its "smart connected stores" that exclusively sell all kinds of Lenovo products. In eastern India, Patna has one such store. The region will get five more stores, with two in Calcutta.

"Lenovo also aims to become the leader in smartphones in the eastern region of the country by the end of this fiscal," Niraj Pancholi, general manager (east) of Lenovo India, said during the launch of the Yoga 3 Pro laptop in Calcutta today.

"We aim to grab a seat among the top five brands in the smartphone segment (in India) within this fiscal," he said.

Lenovo has sold over a million smartphones in India, its latest offering being the K3 Note, which was launched in New Delhi today.

The company, along with Motorola, which it had acquired last year in a $2.9-billion deal, has a 5.6 per cent share of the global smartphone market.

It ranked third, after Samsung and Apple in the January-March quarter, according to research firm IDC.