With Eid coming soon the shopping lists of consumers are no longer confined to just traditional dresses, shoes and jewelry.
Consumers today want to be equipped with the latest gadgets, as mobile phone handsets and other handheld devices have been rapidly gaining in popularity.
Middle class to high-end consumers have been buying such devices at a healthy rate prior to Eid.
"Usually 1million to 1.2 million mobile sets are sold monthly in the market. We expect it to increase by more than 50% during this month of Ramadan," said Hasan Mehedi, head of marketing of Samsung Electronics.
He expected Samsung's sales to rise by 60% to 70% ahead of Eid and expected to increase their market share as well, which is now at 5%.
Hasan Mehedi said: "Usually the sales of handsets go down in the first and second weeks of Ramadan, and jumps to a peak in the last two weeks ahead of Eid. But this year, the sales were increasing from the first week."
Market sources said,in terms of number,the demand for low cost handsets is much higher than the high value ones.
"As Samsung always concentrates on quality and not in numbers, our market share will never be very much high here in Bangladesh," he added.
"Some gadgets have become essential to our daily life and we cannot live without them. So users need to by it and before Eid, sales double," said a senior executive of a different company.
The shoppers as well as the shopkeepers in the markets of Dhaka's Panthapath and adjoining areas looked abuzz with people buying hand held devices.
Different brands of mobile phone handsets have offers marking the occasion as Samsung offered T-shirts of English premier football club Chelsea with each of their Galaxy-star setswhich were selling atTk7,900 per set. The offer also includes a lotterywhere 20 lucky customers can go visit London and watch a Chelsea match live.
Maximux has offered Robi data and T-shirts also with their Fingertip model, price at Tk9,995. Micromax offered loud speakers and an earphone.
Market sources have said different brands have offered additional incentives for customers who will be replacing old phones with new ones, provided they were bought from the same company.
An executive of the local handset vendor Symphony said their sales have almost doubled in the last part of Ramadan. He expressed hope that the sales would be even more in the next few days.
Along with mobile handsets, sales of almost all kinds of IT products have gained in momentum. Laptops, digital cameras, musical devices, multimedia players, memory cards, pen drives and graphics cards have been selling like hotcakes. The companies have also provided various incentives such as discounts and gifts to get hold of customers.
Vendors of IT products mainly of BCS Computer City in Agargaon and Multiplan Computer City in Elephant Road have expressed their satisfaction over the sales ahead of the festival.
At the same time, mobile operators offered different packages and recharge bonus offers marking the occasion.
