Nokia might not be doing well on the global front – but its Indian operations continue to lead the cellular phones market in India. The Finnish brand sells more phones than any other manufacturer in India. Well,I am not saying this. This is from the data we have from CMR’s India Mobile Handsets Market Review for CY 2012 .
According to the report, a total of 221.6 million mobile handsets were shipped in 2012 of which 15.2 million were smartphones. As mentioned earlier, Nokia continues to lead the space with Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia leading the overall market with a handsome 21.8 percent share. Samsung is in second place with 13.7 percent of the market. A not so surprising entry into the list is homegrown brand Micromax – which has managed to notch up to the third position with 6.6 per cent market share.
If you consider just the feature phones sector, Nokia again leads the pack with a huge 22.5 percent of the market. Samsung is in second place with 11.5 percent and Micromax languishes in the third place with 6.5 percent of the feature phones market.
Things however change in the smartphone category. Here, Samsung has managed to simply obliterate Nokia with a huge 43.1 percent of all smartphones shipped in India last year being a Samsung handset. Nokia was in second place with 13.3 percent. An interesting third place holder was Sony with a respectable 8.2 percent of the market in 2012. BlackBerry initially had a good start to 2012 but wa eventually beaten by Sony.
Commenting on the results, Faisal Kawoosa, Lead Analyst, CMR Telecoms Practice said, “Although we see a huge market ‘hype’ around smartphones, the fact remains that the India Mobile Handsets market is still dominated by shipments of featurephones. On the other hand smartphone shipments are growing fast. This indicates India is still a ‘new phone’ market, where featurephones contribute to the bulk of shipments compared to replacements or upgrades.”
“This propensity on the part of Indian subscribers of mobile telephony services to purchase large numbers of featurephones has paved the way for the establishment of Indian brands, which are largely focused on this segment.”
