Oct. 1--HTC Corporation, a Taiwanese manufacturer of smartphones, expects to capture almost one-quarter of the local smartphone market in terms of both volume and value this year, helped by the introduction of the second generation of its best-selling Touch model.

The company expects its revenue to grow by 20 percent to 1.8 billion baht this year with a total sales volume of 100,000 units.

Sales of smartphone handsets in Thailand are projected to grow by 30 percent to 400,000 this year, thanks to lower prices from intense competition. Local mobile handset sales overall are anticipated to have flat growth this year.

Nattawat Woranopakul, country manager of HTC Thailand, said local smartphone sales projections were up between 300,000 and 400,000 this year, fuelled by popularity among social network users and surging mobile data demand.

"The growing popularity of the niche-feature phone segment has pushed average prices down significantly, thanks to economy of production scale," he said.

GFK research found the average price of smartphones is down from 16,000 baht to 12,000 with competition from iPhone, BlackBerry, HTC and Acer.

Overall mobile phone sales over the first seven months of this year dropped 20.2 percent year-on-year, with prices slipping 23.3 percent and sales unit growth of only 4 percent.

The estimated value of the mobile phone market this year is 27.9 billion baht, down 20 percent from last year's 34.9 billion, and a huge drop from 2006, which had a market value of 47.3 billion.

Mr Nattawat said mobile phone sales this year should hit 10 million, up from last year's 9.1 million, due to lower prices.

HTC introduced its new HTC Touch2 smartphone yesterday priced at 16,900 baht. It runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile software with a 4GB micro SD card. "We expect to sell 50,000 Touch2 phones within one year or 12,000 units by the end of this year."

Despite intense competition in the smartphone market, Mr Nattawat said HTC has strength in its user-interface touch screen function and value-for-money internet application services.

He added the smartphone market in Thailand is anticipated to grow at the same pace of 20-30 percent next year.

The penetration of smartphone users globally is expected to reach 13 percent this year, and the figure would climb to 14 percent in 2010 and 22 percent in 2013.

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