Govt to make Sriperumbudur mobile handset hub: Karunanidhi

Chennai, Apr 28 (UNI) Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi today said his government would like to make Sriperumbudur as the world's largest hub for mobilephone handsets manufacturing.

While inaugurating Motorola's Chennai Manufacturing facility here last night, he said Nokia plant is one of the largest hand-sets manufacturing facility in the world in terms of volume.

The Chief Minister said ''Samsung was also in the process of establishing the facility here. Sony Ericsson, too, is making hand-sets here through Foxconn and Flextronics.'' He said the employment generated by the government in the industries, has triggered a cycle of economic growth in allied sectors and service-oriented Industries.

Apart from mobile hand-sets, Sriperumpudur is becoming India's largest manufacturing hub for electronic hardwares and automobiles, including components, he added.

Mr Karunanidhi said after the commissioning of Renault-Nissan car project in 2010, the total capacity of six projects at Irungattukottai-Sriperumbudur- Oragadam-Maramalainagar corridor would exceed 12 lakh cars per year.

''This will make this corridor as one of the top ten car manufacturing centres of the world'', he said, adding ''apart from car manufacturing, the corridor would produce a range of other automobiles, including commercial vehicles, earth moving and construction machinery and tractors, making it Detroit of Asia''.

More projects are also in the pipeline, he added.

''Our Government will sign Memoranda of Understanding(MoUs) in the coming months to fetch more investments in this year than what was achieved during the last 16 years, he said.

The 172.4 crore facility, spread over 2,70,000 sq ft, would support an integrated telecom products portfolio, including GSM and CDMA mobile devices and networking equipment such as base-stations and system controllers.

The manufacturing unit has capacity to produce over 12-million mobile phones and 6,500 base-terminal stations each year, he added.

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