India gets past US to become world’s second largest market for smart phones

Canalys, a leading global technology market analyst firm with a distinct channel focus, has indicated that total smartphone shipments in India reached 40 million units in Q3 2017, making it the second largest market for smartphones.

In a report published Thursday, Canalys analysts noted that China overtook the US to become the biggest smartphone market in 2013, and now India is taking away the second place from it.

The report also indicates that 46.5 percent of the Indian shipments is accounted for by Samsung and Xiaomi.

The huge population of India is partly responsible for this geometric increase; India stands at 1.3 billion against America’s 320 million.

“This growth comes as a relief to the smartphone industry. Doubts about India’s market potential are clearly dispelled by this result,” Ishan Dutt, Canalys analyst said in a statement.

Despite the landmark, watchers have long said that India’s smartphone market is one that will require patience. China, for example, is far ahead with more than 110 million shipments per quarter but issues such as complicated supply chains, local retail laws, import taxes, lower GDP and poorer quality Internet are likely to restrict India’s sales for some time.

There are many familiar brands that are now dominating the Indian market.

According to figures released by Canalys, Samsung is leading with 9.4 million shipments in Q2 with Xiaomi following closely with 9.2 million.

Among the top five are Lenovo, Oppo and Vivo. Apple is missing on the chart, despite doubling shipments in Q3. Analysts say the unimpressive number is due to the low-end smartphone orientation of the Indian market.

Again, the relatively high price of the I Phone doesn’t make it a favourite in India, thus Apple has a lot of to do on price to make it achieve deep market penetration in the country that houses Bollywood.

The report also noted that shipments to India are expected to keep growing due to “low smartphone penetration and the explosion of LTE”, so the US is unlikely to return to the second position in the near-term.

By Tony Ademiluyi