66 percent of the phones sold in Q3 2016 were Made in India
India shipped 197.5 million mobile handsets by the end of September 2016. The shipments are set to clock 265 million by the year end with 78.4 million mobile handsets being shipped in the third quarter alone.
At the end of the third quarter of 2016, Samsung topped the overall mobile handset shipments. The Korean smartphone vendor, now struggling with its Note7 debacle continues to sell more smartphones than peers with a market share of 24.6 percent. Samsung also commands 24.5 percent market share in the feature phone segment.
"All these years, Smartphone makers have been focusing on making the handsets affordable for more and more hands-on experience. This has paid off well, but cannot promise continuous sustainable growth for Smartphones in the country. Time has come when the things need to be looked at holistically and increase the relevance of Smartphones in the lives of wider user base. That will spur the era of next growth for Smartphones," said Faisal Kawoosa, Principal Analyst for Telecoms at CMR.
CMR report says 66 percent of the phones sold in Q3 were made in India. A total of 137 brands shipped mobile phones, of which 69 brands shipped smartphones. Every second 4G smartphone shipped during Q3 2016 had a Qualcomm chipset and 83 percent of the 4G smartphones shipped supported 4G VoLTE.
Samsung has a significant lead in the 4G smartphone market. Samsung has a market share of 32.1 percent followed by Lenovo with 14.6 percent and Reliance LYF with 10.7 percent. Lenovo Group (including Motorola) has overtaken Micromax as the second biggest smartphone brand in India. However, Lava and Intex dominate the overall mobile handset market with 9.7 percent and 9.3 percent share respectively.
"While the ecosystem is working on to make data services more affordable, accessible and meaningful for the subscribers, the majority is still looking for a reliable voice communications. This is forcing even a future ready network like Jio to work on innovative models of launching Volte-enabled 4G Featurephones to tap the voice potential," added Faisal.
Over 98 percent of the smartphones were powered by Android operating system with more than 25 percent running Marshmallow out of the box. Oppo has managed to become the second most popular brand among value for money and premium smartphone buyers. Samsung has 49.2 percent market share in the supremium smartphone segment, closely followed by Apple with 43.3 percent share.
The CMR report further cautions that the handset makers need to align their product roadmaps with the expectations of actual users. The report says mobile makers need to switch from 'Connecting India' to 'Connect with India' and understand user requirements going forward.
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