The Indian mobile industry is the fastest growing in the world and India continues to add more mobile connections every month than any other country in the world. The telecom boom in the country provides great opportunity to handset manufacturers and the hottest segment for these manufacturers is the entry level segment.
Voice&Data’s 16th annual survey ‘V&D 100’ covered all the mobile handset companies doing business in India across categories like feature phones, multimedia phones, enterprise phones and smartphones. Both multi-national and Indian mobile phone firms were surveyed for this report. Here are some interesting findings from the report.
- Nokia remained the #1 player in handset business and grew at a dismal 0.2%. It faced tough competition in the entry level segments to home grown handset makers like Micromax, Karbonn and Spice whereas it’s high-end phones faced a tough competition from brands like Samsung, BlackBerry and HTC.Nokia enjoys a market share of 39.0%.
- Samsung captured 17.2% of market share and grew by 21.7%. Samsung’s success can be attributed to its rich product portfolio on various popular operating systems like Windows, Android and Bada.
- Micromax captured #3 slot among V&D100 Top 10 mobile handset brands for FY2010-11. The company grew 43% during the fiscal and grabbed a market share of 6.9%.
- Research in Motion’s brand BlackBerry ranked among top 5 mobile phone brands in India. Positioning itself at #4, the Blackberry grew by 61.2%. Its entry level smartphone saw more sales in the fourth quarter than all other three quarters put together. This shows that smartphones offered at an economical price can storm the feature phone market.
- HTC saw a growth of 99%, the highest, among all the brands surveyed by Voice&Data, this growth is driven almost entirely by its Android range.
- As the 3G services extend nationwide, the 3G phones would see a much bigger traction triggering entry of more 3G enabled phones at affordable prices.
- The fixed phone market shrunk by over a quarter.
