CHENNAI has edged past China as a unitwise volume producer of Nokia cellphones. In fact, Nokia's Chennai factory is now the company's largest cellphone manufacturing facility in the world.

China has two such Nokia factories and Chennai, one. But Chennai Nokia has now edged past the larger of the two Chinese factories, which so long was also Nokia's largest in the world. While the Finnish cellphone maker is keeping a tight lid on the annual capacity of its Chennai factory, a senior member of its global planning team said that the Chennai factory is now indeed its largest manufacturing factory. Unofficial reports suggest that Chennai manufactures 100 million phones-plus every year.

Interestingly, over 70% of Nokia's 8000-strong employee pool at the Chennai plant are women involved in a mix of running productions lines, maintenance and assembly & testing operations.

Nokia operates nine state-of-the-art mobile phone manufacturing units worldwide which are located in India, Finland, China, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Romania and Hungary. "The Chennai factory is the largest in Nokia's global ecosystem, although the dynamics in terms of productline vary in each market. But the international markets that we serve out of Chennai have seen the largest growth in terms of volume.

At present, Nokia ships GSM phones from Chennai factory to over 50 markets spanning South East Asia Pacific, India, the Middle East and Africa," said a senior official who did not wish to be named. Fastest ramp-up in TN

A NOKIA India spokesman said: "As a company policy, we do not share specific capacity numbers of our factories worldwide. All I can confirm at this stage is that our Chennai operation has seen the fastest ever ramp-up across our nine cellphone manufacturing plants. The ramp-up is in terms of the unprecedented growth in cellphone production volumes within a three-year span."

The latest development is seen as a milestone of sorts for the Finnish cellphone maker and is in sync with its plans to take big strides to grow the Indian handset turf. It also comes at a time when the world's top cellphone makers under the ambit of the Indian Cellular Association (ICA) are targeting a national production volume of 250 million mobile handsets by calendar 2012. Several presentations have been recently made to the DoT by the manufacturing advisory committee. The larger objective of players like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Spice is the creation of an additional 1 lakh jobs during 2009-14 in cellphone manufacturing, assembling, R&D and design sectors.