New IIP Series: Samsung to replace Nokia in telecom output data

“We were considering Micromax earlier. Now, since that deal did not fomalise, we have chosen Samsung’s Noida factory for gauging mobile production in India for IIP,” the official said.

Nokia stopped manufacturing mobile phones from its Chennai plant last year after getting involved in a tax imbroglio with the government. Due to the freeze on sale of Nokia India’s assets in an income tax case, the Chennai plant was left out of the $2.7 billion deal between Microsoft and Nokia Corporation to acquire latter’s global mobile phone business.

Once touted as the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturing plant, Nokia’s Chennai factory employed 8,000 permanent workers, producing more than 15 million phones a month. Samsung’s Noida plant has a production capacity of around four million mobile phones a month.

The mobile phones category is a part of ‘Telephone Instruments Including Mobile Phone And Accessories’ item group in the factory output.

The official also added that they will monitor five factories for output of rubber insulated cable instead of one at present. Monitoring of one factory for output of rubber insulated cable often resulted in volatility in capital goods output in IIP data, another official said.

The weight of telephone instruments is 0.22 per cent in the Index of Industrial Production, while the weight of rubber insulated cable is 0.12 per cent.

The change in mobile manufacturer is a part of a series of changes proposed for the new IIP. Based on the recommendations of the working group headed by former Planning Commission Member Saumitra Chaudhuri, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation will introduce a new IIP series with effect from

April 2016, data for which will be released in June 2016.

Among the other changes proposed for the the new series of IIP is a Technical Review Committee, which will meet once a year to review the basket of items, the official said. Also, the new IIP series will have the base year of 2011-12, the same as that for other macroeconomic data.

The Saumitra Chaudhuri committee had recommended a change in the weights as well as categorisation of use based classification of the industries. It had suggested doing away with the class of basic goods and continuing with groups of primary goods, intermediate groups, capital goods and consumer goods.

Further, it recommended a larger factory size using data from the Annual Survey of Industries and other sources such as private manufacturers registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. It also called for creation of a back series of three years to provide a comparison between the two data sets.