Mumbai: Mobile phone sales crossed the 50 million mark in the January-March quarter of this year, up 9.1% from last year at the same, according to the latest data released by Cybermedia Research India. Smartphones made up 5.3% of the phones sold and almost a quarter of the total handset revenues in India.
Multi-sim handsets, which have been very popular among Indian consumers, accounted for two-thirds of the total sales while 3G handset accounted for under 10% of total sales, according to the Cybermedia numbers.
In the overall mobile handsets market, troubled Finnish handset maker Nokia retained its leadership position with 23% share, followed by Samsung at second position with 14.1% and homegrown brand Micromax at third position with 5.8%, in terms of sales (unit shipments) during the January-March period.
"As the India mobile handsets market grows the needs of users are clearly seen to be converging around two major form factors - high-power, high-speed smartphones vis-a-vis value-plus, content-enabled feature phones. While most players are strong in a particular category, Samsung and others have been able to maintain a strong presence across the spectrum," said Anirban Banerjee, associate vice president, research and advisory services, Cybermedia Research.
Players like Motorola and Sony have chosen to stay in the high value smartphones segment, which accounts for just 5.3% of shipments but added up to as much as 23.4% of the market value in the January-March quarter, according to the data released by Cybermedia.
"Currently, large, international players like Nokia and RIM, as well as relatively new entrants like Micromax, Karbonn, Lava and Spice are faced with the challenge to enhance their portfolio of products, models and services, to stay relevant and profitable in the long run," added Naveen Mishra, lead analyst, Telecoms Practice, Cybermedia Research.
Shipments of multi-SIM handset category continued its rise, accounting for as much as 67.7% of total shipments in the last quarter.
However, even more significantly, total shipments of 3G-enabled mobile handsets in the country touched 4.7 million units during the first quarter of the year. While this was a decline of (-)7.8% over the the October-December 2011 known as the 'festival quarter', it was a growth of 34.3% over the corresponding period last year.
"With the recently announced reduction in tariffs of 3G services by as much as 70% by leading India telecom service providers, the market for both 3G-enabled devices and mobile broadband-driven content is likely to see an upward trend in the forthcoming quarters," said Tarun Pathak, a telecoms analysts with Cybermedia Research. CyberMedia Research uses the term shipments to describe the number of handsets leaving the factory premises for stocking by distributors and retailers.
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