Mumbai: Smartphone market in India crossed the 30 Million unit shipments milestone for the first time ever in a quarter in CY Q3 2016, according to the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. The market continued its healthy traction with 11 percent YoY growth.
According to the report 17.5 percentage growth has been recorded over the previous quarter. “This seasonal spike in third quarter of the year can be attributed to the channel preparation for the festive season, mega online sales and early import of smartphones owing to Chinese holidays in October” says Karthik J, Senior Market Analyst, Client Devices, IDC India.
Samsung leads the Indian smartphone market with 23 percentage share with 8 percent sequential growth and 9.7 percent growth from the same period last year. Despite the recall of Samsung’s flagship Note 7, multiple new launches across both offline and online channels added onto the its strong portfolio helped vendor to grow at a healthy rate in CY Q3 2016. J2 continues to be a key contributor for Samsung.
Lenovo Group (including Motorola) climbed to the second place with 9.6 percent share of smartphones. Similar to the CY Q3 2015 trend, Lenovo Group’s shipment sprang up in CY Q3 2016 with growth of 46.1 percent over previous quarter. Motorola’s volume almost doubled Quarter-on-Quarter driven by newly launched E3 Power and G4 models. K5 series continues to be lead runner for Lenovo accounting for over 40 percent of its total volume.
They are followed by Micromax, Xiomi and Reliance Jio.
“Mobile vendor ecosystem is going through a multi-dimensional transition. Continuous investment from China based vendors on retail expansion and high decibel marketing has led to disruption in the plans of home-grown vendors to some extent. To remain relevant, home-grown vendors are counting on the feature phone market even though they are facing certain supply issues for a few components” says Jaipal Singh, Market Analyst, Client Devices, IDC India. “Also, vendors are relooking at the channel strategy by getting lower tier distributors on-board, positioning more staff at storefronts and adopting the right mix of products in both online and offline channels” adds Singh.
Migration from feature phone to smartphone has slowed down, helping India based vendors to maintain their dominance in overall mobile market. Though feature phone market is consolidated with few key vendors, it is also witnessing the emergence of new brands. Intel in its second quarter in Indian market has quadrupled its shipments while Zen mobile shipments have more than doubled over the previous quarter.