The Smartphone Market in India is Booming

With a billion-strong population and a growing economy, India is an increasingly significant market for mobile developers and perhaps unsurprisingly, the smartphone market in India is booming. India is in love with the smartphone. Homegrown companies are vying with bigger players from China and South Korea to bring mobile devices to a market primarily concerned with budget technologies, but now one in three mobile devices in India is a smartphone. 

In the face of local and regional competition, one company comes out consistently on top. Samsung remains the industry leader as we enter the final quarter of 2015. During Q3, the electronics behemoth cornered 23.2% of the market; its nearest competitor was local brand Micromax, which rose one percent to 17.7%. 

Such impressive growth in India only emphasizes the current stagnation in saturated markets like China and the United States. During Q2, smartphone sales showed a 44% year on year growth, and some analysts predict that, by 2017 the smartphone market in India will have grown substantially. So much so that India will overtake the United States as the world’s second biggest smartphone market. 

The reason Samsung has stayed in pole position is their flexibility and willingness to create a wide range of devices, each catering to then specific demands of regional markets. Mostly known in the west for the Galaxy S6 and Note 5, Samsung’s biggest sellers in India are the Galaxy J, a mid-priced device that retails at around $190, and the Galaxy A, which is priced towards the higher end, starting at around $480. 

It’s this wide-ranging approach to innovation, taking into account all budgets and needs, that really separates Samsung from Apple in the global marketplace. Indeed, Apple had a marketshare of just 1% in India (which still accounts for a not-to-sniffed-at 1.7 million devices). 

Not that Samsung can or should rest on their laurels. The aforementioned Micromax, and Indian company, is shifting more than 100,000 mobile phones each month, and prides themselves on even more diversity than Samsung, developing 30 different designs in a single year. This gives them different price points for different parts of the market, not dissimilar to the way automobile brands have multiple models for various price segments.

Apple are unlikely to shift towards this model. It goes against their brand image as the exclusive top dog, dripfeeding updates to their devotees - and ramping up the marketing assault each time. Diversification is not on the cards. Which suits Micromax, Samsung et al just fine.