The smartphone market in India has maintained its momentum, with shipments climbing 84% YoY and 11% QoQ to reach 18.42 million units in the second quarter, according to IDC.
The research firm said the potential for future growth in India’s smartphone market remains quite high as 71% of the market continues to be on feature phones.
In the second quarter, the overall India mobile phone market stood at 63.21 million units, a 5% sequential increase, which was attributed to both product categories -- smartphones and feature phones.
Volume growth in the smartphone market is also being noted due to the re-defined, low-price smartphone models and continuous migration from feature phones to smartphones.
The sub-$200 category of the smartphone market is increasing in terms of new shipment share as the contribution from this category stood at 81%.
With the influx of Chinese vendors and Mozilla’s plans to enter the smartphone category at the $50 price level, the low-end segment of the smartphone market will become crucial in the coming quarters.
The shipment of “phablets” (5.5 inch - 6.99 inch screen) was noted to be 5.4% of the overall smartphone segment. More than half of the phablets shipped were in the under-$250 price band and Indian vendors are dominant in the noted price segment.
“IDC observes that a new entry level price point is being breached by the Indian home grown vendors every quarter, (with devices that) are not equipped with high end specifications and RAM is typically 256 MB,” said Karan Thakkar, senior market analyst at IDC India. “This ultra low-cost segment may not sound a viable option to the repeat buyers, but it works well on the targeted segment.”