The Indian mobile phone market has continued to grow at a decent pace, but now is mainly driven smartphones, especially the phablets category. According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC) APEJ Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the Indian mobile phone market had a 12% growth year on year and a 7% growth quarter over quarter. Share of feature phones has slid to 81% of the total market in third quarter of 2013, despite feature phones market is grown at 3% QoQ during the reported quarter.
The smartphone market, however, has seen a massive growth of 229% YoY during the quarter. The IDC report says vendors shipped a total of 12.8 million smartphones in the third quarter, as compared to 3.8 million units in the same period of 2012. 3Q13 grew by close to 28% over the units shipped in the second quarter of 2013 (2Q13).
Phablets – smartphones with 5.0-inch to 6.99-inch screen sizes, showed a sustained growth in the third quarter of 2013, with phablets contributing up to 23% in the overall market in terms of volume.
According to the IDC report, the third quarter saw a stiff competition between top local vendors including Micromax and Karbonn. However, international vendors such as Nokia and Samsung rode on their new product launches to gain 30% of the overall market during the quarter.
“The growth in the smartphone market continues to drive the overall growth numbers for the phone market – given that there’s still a huge potential for smartphone penetration in India, this trend is expected to continue in the coming quarters”, says Manasi Yadav, Senior Market Analyst with IDC India.
“The change agents for this rapid shift of consumer preference towards Smartphones have been the narrowing price gap between Feature phones and Smartphones. The Smartphone market is expected to maintain these elevated levels of growth in the near future” comments Kiran Kumar, Research Manager.
With a share of 32.9%, Samsung ranks first in the Indian smartphone market. Local vendor Micromax has second spot with 17.1% share. Karbonn and Nokia follow with 11.2% and 5.0% share respectively.
Lava Mobiles has made its place in the top 5 for the first time, mainly because of huge shipments from Xolo and Iris branded smartphones. IDC in its report notes: “Some of the top selling models for the brand are IRIS 349 and IRIS 402. Keeping in mind the shifting consumer preferences, there has been a conscious shift from feature phones to smartphones, which is expected to continue in the upcoming quarters too.”
You can check out the full APEJ Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report here.