With Android smartphones selling like hot cakes in India, there was no doubt that within years India will become a major market for Smartphones. According to an analyst firm Canalys, during the second quarter of the year 2013, India is now the fastest growing smartphone market by 129% to hit 9.0 million and its now the third largest smartphone market just behind US and China.
Global smartphone leader Samsung leads in India with third of the Indian smartphone market this quarter. Samsung success in India is mainly due to heavy investment made by them on branding and channel relationships across India. Interestingly Indian local vendors are playing a major role in the smartphone market with Micromax having around 22% of the smartphone market share, just behind Samsung in second spot and Karbonn taking the third spot. Other international brands Sony and Nokia made up the top five, with Nokia losing the most.
“India is a market in transition, moving from feature phones to smart phones, and is a market that offers huge potential as hundreds of millions of users have yet to upgrade their feature phones. Domestic vendors, such as Micromax and Karbonn, are capitalizing on the popularity of their feature phones and are quicker to respond to local market demands, hence their current success.” said Jessica Kwee, Canalys Analyst.
Other interesting findings from the report –
- A total of 238.1 million smartphones shipped during the Q2 2013.
- Globally Samsung leads the smartphone market with 75.6million shipments followed by Apple and Lenovo
- As always Android grew the fastest during the quarter, by 79% year-on-year powering more than 190 million smartphones or almost 80% of all smartphones shipped in Q2.
- Microsoft’s Windows Phone shipment grew by 54% annually driven by Nokia, but still only hold a mere 3% of the market share.
- BlackBerry’s shipments also grew by 15%, helping it to retain a 3% share of the smartphone market.