Spice follows Nokia, Motorola in move to manufacture phones in India Indian company Spice plans to manufacture mobile phones in India by the third quarter of next year, according to an executive of the company.The company is targeting its mobile phones at India and neighboring markets in South Asia where the customer requirements are similar, said Kunal Ahooja, chief executive officer of Spice on Friday.Spice, in Noida near Delhi, is a subsidiary of MCorpGlobal, a business group in Noida with interests in mobile telephony services, office automation, and IT. Spice has already started selling mobile phones in India, designed by a company in Taiwan that does both the chip set design and software development, according to Ahooja. A contract manufacturer in Taiwan is making the phones, he said.Since the launch of three mobile handsets models in June this year the company has been selling 20,000 handsets a month, although the launch was confined to a few parts of North India, Ahooja added.Nokia, in Espoo, Finland, has also announced plans to make phones in India, while Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois, announced this week that it will assemble one phone model in India as the first step in “a multiphase manufacturing strategy”. As for Spice, “We think that as an Indian company we know what the Indian customer needs, and we are also able to take decisions faster on what new features and models to introduce into the market,” Ahooja said.The phones made by Spice, besides including the latest features, will also attend to small details like the need for louder ring tones and more powerful microphones in a country where ambient noise can be very high, according to Ahooja. The keypads of the phones will also be dark in color so that dirt does not show, he added. The company plans to make 500,000 phones in the first year of manufacture. Technology Industry