Although, we are seeing new expensive smartphones (Rs. 15k and above) being launched at increasing frequency , very few actually buy them, even in the large Indian cities. According to a recent report, only 4 percent Indians or about 44 million mobile users use smartphones.
This fact is also attested by a recent study conducted by Snapdeal which highlights the Online Shopping Trends in the Mobiles and Tablets category. According to the findings, of all the mobiles sold on snapdeal.com, 8 out of 10 mobiles were priced below Rs. 5,000 and 95% of the tablets sold were below Rs 10,000.
Price Wise Mobile / Tablet Sales [percentage]
Other Mobile and Tablet online sales Trends
- Smartphones, especially the cheaper ones (below 10k price) are being preferred by customers accounting for 23% of all the mobile devices sold.
- Micromax is the most popular brand of mobile phones sold on Snapdeal. Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and HTC complete the Top 5.
- In tablets category as well, Micromax is the most popular brand with its Funbook range of tablets. Micromax Funbook is also the most searched tablet on Snapdeal.
- Nearly half of all the mobile and tablet customers are from Tier I cities.
- Growth of Tablets outpaced the growth in Mobiles market by 3 times. Tablets sales registered a growth rate of 33 percent month-on-month as compared to Mobiles sales growth at 11 percent.
- Surprisingly, Symbian (Primarily Nokia phones) is still the most preferred Mobile Operating System followed by Android OS.
- Customers now see camera as part of mobile phones. Camera phone sales grew by over 100 percent, while the growth in mobile phones without camera dropped by 32 percent.
- Android forms 94 percent of Tablet OS Market Share.
The findings surely point at one thing – we are a price conscious market and anything cheap with decent features will do well in India. An expensive device, whatever the features (aka iPad, iPhone), can never go mainstream…
