58.9M Mobile Handsets Shipped In India In 1st Quarter Of 2014, Registers 16.4% QoQ Decline: CMR
Around 59 million mobile handsets were shipped in first quarter of 2014 compared to 70.4 million mobile handsets shipped in last quarter of calendar year 2013 (4Q2013). The fall in mobile handsets shipments has been attributed to seasonal decline as the previous quarter is generally the time when Indians make lot of purchases due to festive season. The findings are based on Cyber Media Research’s monthly mobile handsets market review report for India.
On a brighter side, mobile handset shipments registered 8.9% growth compared to same quarter last year (1Q2013). Smartphone shipments grew a whopping 219.4 percent during the same period, while the feature phone shipments declined by 6.5 percent.
During first quarter of 2014, 14.5 million smartphone shipments were made as compared to 44.4 million feature phone shipments.
Mobile Brands Market Share
Samsung increased their market share by 4.7 percent taking it to 20.3 percent in 1Q2014. The growth also ensure that they beat Nokia to become the top mobile handset brand in India. Nokia has 16.16 percent market share in previous quarter as against Samsung’s 15.6 percent.
Even though Nokia’s market share increased to 17.6 percent, they came second to Samsung due to their sluggish growth.
Micromax was came in third best with 11.2 percent market share. Interestingly, their market share actually decreased from 11.6 percent which they registered in previous quarter.
Micromax had a stellar 2012 and decent 2013 on back of their successful Canvas brand. However, it seems that people now have plenty of better options and are now opting less for Micromax brand.
On the fall of Nokia Faisal Kawoosa, Lead Analyst, CMR Telecoms Practice said,“Nokia’s slip down was inevitable as the vendor’s smartphone portfolio came very late and hasn’t been able to impress the potential customer base to a large extent. At the same time, Samsung continues to serve all the price segments of the market very well. With ‘Asha’ portfolio, Nokia tried to create a new segment of smart feature phones and that did help Nokia to record an impressive share in the feature phones segment. But as newer companies, particularly the domestic brands, came out with disruptive propositions, the concept of smart feature phone seems to be dying.”
In short, feature phones are dying. And when you can get a stellar smartphone like Moto E for Rs. 6999, I guess very few will opt for a feature phone!
Indian Smartphones Market
According to CMR report, nearly a quarter of all mobile shipments now constitute of smartphones. While the growth year on year has been quite stellar, compared to previous quarter 1Q2014 saw only a marginal growth in shipments of 1.9%.
Another interesting thing about smartphone shipments was that out of all the smartphones shipped 68.3 percent were 3G enabled phones.
As far as Smartphones brand go, Samsung further increased their lead in market share to 43.2% compared to 40.4 percent in the previous quarter. Micromax was second with 17.5% and Karbonn had third largest shipments constituting 5.2%. While Samsung and Micromax saw decent growth, Karbonn’s shipments less than halved compared to previous quarter (11.1% compared to 5.2%)
CMR report gives only the top 3 brands in market share. It would have been interesting to see how Motorola has done in the first quarter as they had released Moto G and Moto X. Moto G was very successful and Indians bought it in large numbers. I am sure they would have significantly increased their share in India!
