Indian consumers always have liking towards cost efficient products or rather call them affordable products. Anything that is affordable to Indian consumer, he will buy it, he might not use it later or criticize it for being less durable or something like that. But that’s not the point here anyway; here we are going to talk about the changing trend in the mobile phone market in India.
What is it that brings a lot of concern in the Indian mobile phone industry? Do we even call it a mobile phone industry? No! Not really, as we popularly call it the “Smartphone Industry” these days, and that’s exactly is what is making the low end feature phones suffer. Because a phone is no more a phone, it has become a smartphone, it needs to play music, movies, games and most importantly shoot good photos.
Image courtesy DAZINFO
Lets go through a recent report from IDC on the changing trend of smartphones in India. According to this report Indian smartphone market has grown very rapidly, but this growth has negatively impacted the feature phone sales. Smartphones in India has seen 229% growth year-over-year while feature phones take a dip by 81%.
The report further revealed that Micromax has seen exceptional growth in last one year. Micromax last year stood with 6.3% share in the market which currently has increased to 22%. With this Micromax has become 2nd largest phone supplier in India. Samsung shares about 33% stake in the market while Karbonn is slowly climbing with 13% share.
One can talk a lot about this shift from phones to smartphones, but what made smartphones so viral in India? Why is that we see smartphones at every corner of the country? Why don’t we see those old style feature phones anymore? And there is only one answer to all these questions; it is the Affordability and Availability of Android phones. That’s right one might think smartphones are costly and not everyone would buy it, but that’s not the scenario anymore. We have Micromax, Samsung, LG, Karbonn, Lemon, Lava, Xolo, Gionee and a whole bunch of companies who offer you a smartphones for as low as Rs 3,500. These brands also offer premium smartphones contending in the high price range.
These smartphone makers in India are offering a phone for every age group and in every price range while giving buyers unique set of features which otherwise are not available on the feature phones. Moreover Android phones come with beautiful designs and useful accessories. We use smartphones while we travel in train and bus, we use them under the desk in college, we use them to check email, we use smartphones to get directions, book movies what not. Smartphones have become a part of our life- for some it is like a body part and that they cant do without their smartphones. Feature phones did not come with a lot of features and were majorly used for making calls and sending texts.
According to Kiran Kumar, currently appointed as Research manager at IDC, the shift took place as the line between the prices of smartphones and feature phone became thinner. Given the low price structure of Android devices customers have changed there preference to Android phones from feature phones.
Lets go through some of the cheapest devices in the Indian market
Karbonn A1 Plus- Rs 3,390
Micromax Bolt A26- Rs 3,406
Micromax Bolt A62- Rs 3,625
Micromax Bolt A35- Rs 3,690
iBall Andi 3.5r- Rs 2,999
