14 DAY TRIAL // The smartphone market in India is growing at a fast rate, but it appears that the Nokia brand remains strong in the country, despite the fact that it has lost significant share there over the past few years.
According to a recent report from IDC, Nokia managed to grab 4 percent of the smartphone market share in the country in the first quarter of the year, which brought it back to the top five vendors there.
However, the research firm also notes that Nokia X, the Android-based smartphone that the Finnish company unveiled at the MWC show in Barcelona in February, contributed to this growth.
In addition to Nokia X, the company also enjoyed an increase in sales of Lumia devices at the entry level of the market. Overall, the vendor moved around 700,000 smartphones in India in the first three months of the year.
As mentioned above, the smartphone segment is growing fast in India, with around 17.59 million units shipped in Q1, up 186 percent year-on-year.
South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung was leading the trend, with 35 percent market share, while Micromax came in second, with 15 percent of shipments.
Local vendors Karbonn and Lava were placed third and fourth, with 10 percent and percent market share, respectively.
The aforementioned IDC report also shows that the rest of vendors present on the market in India accounted for 38 percent of the total shipments in the quarter.
Apparently, smartphones with large screens (5.5 inch-6.99 inch) have seen significant growth too, accounting for around 5 percent of the overall market in the aforementioned three-month period.
Cheap devices were the main growth drivers of the smartphone segment in India, it seems, as they represented over 78 percent of overall sales.
“As more vendors continue to launch low priced smartphone models, the price gap between feature phones and smartphones will be narrowed, driving rampant user migration in the price sensitive Indian market,” says Manasi Yadav, senior market analyst at IDC India.
“This rapid pace of growth in smartphones is expected to continue in India. While we notice that much of the growth is coming from low-cost devices using the Android operating system, Windows is making adequate gains too based on the strength of the entry level product mix in smartphones,” comments Kiran Kumar, research manager, Client Devices at IDC India.
The feature phone segment continued to shrink in India, yet Nokia was still strong in this area, with 13 percent market share (or 5.65 million out of 43.5 million handsets), as WMPoweruser notes.