Since 2016, Samsung and Apple were seen expanding their territories while major Chinese handset manufacturers such as Gionee, Huawei, Oppo, BBK (Vivo), Xiaomi, Lenovo etc, have continued to invest huge amounts of funds in India. Unfortunately, these disruptive investments haven’t benefited much to the local brands such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn which has continued to fall off in terms of market share. In terms of numbers, Samsung India has shown a sales decline of about 4% from last year and Micromax has lost about 5% of unit sales as per a report by Gartner.
Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner said, “With the slowdown in sales in major markets, including the U.S., China and mature Western Europe, India represents the largest opportunity because it is the second-largest mobile phone market after China.”
The report further highlights, “With every good smartphone getting really cheap, smartphones market is expected to grow to 62% of total mobile phone sales in India.”
As far as the impact of demonetization, which happened November 2016, is concerned report says that people in India are now more comfortable paying via digital payment methods which, in turn, is set to scale up the demand for smartphones in near future. It further adds, “This opens the opportunity for service providers to launch mobile wallet solution or even vendors to launch their exclusive mobile payment solutions like Android Pay or Apple Pay to build an ecosystem.”
.Another important point which Gartner notes were in the Average Selling Price (ASP). The company claims that consumers nowadays are willing to spend a little more to get a smartphone with better features than being stuck on the lowest price smartphones.
“The growing ASP trend will be maintained in the coming years with the increasing middle-class population and rising per capita income leading to more disposable income to be spent on electronic goods,”Gupta said.