Korean electronics giant Samsung topped 25 brands to lead the 4G LTE devices vertical in the Indian smartphone market in terms of shipments, according to the analytics firm Cybermedia Research (CMR)
“Samsung currently leads the market with 30% share of devices, emerging as the largest 4G smartphone brand. The Korean brand increased its market share from 24.5% in the first quarter (January-March) to 30% in terms of units shipped,” CMR said.
Lenovo gained significantly and was behind Samsung with a 21.8% market share, while Xiaomi rounded off the top three players with 17.1% market share.
“The best selling handsets in the 4G/LTE segment were the A6000 from Lenovo and Redmi2 from Xiaomi. This indicates that the India market is being propelled by shipments of devices in the Rs 6,000-10,000 price range,” CMR Telecoms Practice analyst Vikrant Singh said.
The segment in itself grew 154% quarter-on-quarter to reach 5.7 million units during April-June 2015 continuing the momentum of doubling in shipments for the second consecutive quarter. The 4G devices shipped during the period continued to be predominantly smartphones with 97% contribution in terms of units.
“As per earlier estimates, we expected that India would ship 5 million 4G Smartphones a quarter by the fourth quarter of 2015. But, with the current trend of doubling of shipments every quarter, we can now realistically expect that number to be in the vicinity of 10 million; in that event total 4G device shipments in the country should cross 11 million units per quarter by the end of this calendar year,” CMR Telecoms Practice lead analyst Faisal Kawoosa said.
“This is mainly happening due to four factors — reputed brands launching their LTE devices, for instance, smartphone vendors like Asus; vendors going beyond online sales and venturing into ‘offline’ stores, such as Xiaomi; players adding more models to their existing 4G portfolio like OnePlus, and the recent full blown launch of 4G services by Airtel, which enables users to actually use their devices for such a feature.”
Also, the number of players in the device segment increased from 19 in the first quarter (January-March) to 25 during the second. “Most of the big brands reflected an increase in their 4G/LTE shipments during second quarter of 2015, except Apple and OnePlus whose shipments declined as also their market shares,” said CMR.
While 4G smartphone and datacard shipments grew at 157% and 107% respectively, tablets declined by 7%,” the firm added.
