The country’s smartphone market registers 12% growth
By Dileep Thekkethil
India’s burgeoning smartphone market has been registering a staggering growth of 12% a year with 24.4 million units of smartphone shipments in the first Quarter of 2016, says a report published by Canalys.
The First quarter report does not bring any surprises as major players who earlier dominated the top 5 positions were able to retain them, with the South Korean Samsung in the lead, followed by Micromax, Intex, Lenovo and Lava.
According to the report, Lenovo, a Chinese manufacturer, made the biggest growth as its shipments went up to 63% during Q1 2015. Its triumph is mainly attributed to the newly introduced low-cost high-end smartphones and offline channel strategies.
Coming to the big global names such as Micromax, BlackBerry, Sony and LG, all of them ended up losing their market in India, as the trend shifted towards highly configured low-cost smartphones.
Ishan Dutt, a research analyst at Canalys, said that the last 18 months have been phenomenal for the Indian smartphone industry as it was rocked by the arrival of new international vendors (particularly from China), the move to LTE and the desire for higher-quality devices have all had a big impact.
He also added that Indian companies faced high competition from foreign vendors as they were quick to cash in on the changing trends quickly.
According to the report, the worst affected Indian manufacturer was Micromax, which has been passing through tough times with some of the key executives of the company leaving. Micromax’s market share fell by a couple of percentage points to 16.7% in Q1 2016. Micromax is said to be revamping its strategy to incorporate an ecosystem of services around payments and content
Even though Apple is still in the eighth position, the growth rate of the Cupertino-based company has been stable with an increased shipment of 56%, making it the second fastest growing smartphone vendor.
“Apple is outperforming the overall market in India, and still has great growth potential,†said Canalys Mobility Analyst Wilmer Ang.
Apple has cast a shadow over Samsung’s growth prospects in India as its premium smartphones are fighting hard against Apple to maintain dominance. According to the report, registered an annoying 25% fall in its market for smartphones priced above $300 during the Q1 of 2016. On the other hand, Apple registered a growth of 11% to 29%, thanks to the successive price cuts to the iPhone 5s made it the most popular Apple device on the market.
According to Canalys analysts, the growth of Apple phone was largely because of they made iPhone 5S affordable after a series of price cuts. The research firm is skeptical about the success of the company’s latest flagship 4-inch smartphone iPhone SE as it is a smaller but expensive smartphone.
Also, the recent government regulation curbing discounts on smartphones sold by online platforms will affect demand.