India has presented a considerable opportunity for the makers of handsets in China.
There are currently twelve smartphone manufacturers from China that are currently making technology news by cutting their way into the handset market in India over the last few years, and their share is continuing to rise.
A couple of years ago, they took only 1-2 percent, but now they have risen above a 10 percent share.
These companies sell devices that are as inexpensive as $49.99 to the more premium products that are over $650. The technology news that is being made has to do with the fact that they are starting to bite into the share of the market that has previously been held by other manufacturers. As these devices have made their way onto store shelves in India, they have already started to take off.
Technology news was already being made in China where these devices taken a bite out of Apple’s turf.
Now they are moving outward in Asia, as the smartphone market’s growth is starting to slow in China. These manufacturers of mobile devices are looking for opportunities elsewhere, including India, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among others. The growth that they are expected to experience is predicted to be quite fast. India is already the third largest smartphone market in the world and it has the highest growth in the Asia Pacific region for these devices.
According to the IDC, the year over year growth in smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2014 was a massive 186 percent – nearly doubling its figures from the same quarter in 2013. It is estimated that in India, there are slightly more than 30 million smartphones being sold every year.
Furthermore, fewer than one in ten mobile users in India currently has a smartphone, and only approximately 17 percent of the cell phones shipped into the country in 2013 fit into that category. This could suggest to the Chinese smartphone manufacturers that this country is primed and ready for the evolution in mobile tech, and grabbing hold of that market could make massive technology news for those companies.
Second place, behind Android, was Symbian. Apple’s devices make up only 19.9 percent of the Chinese mobile market, while Symbian is a notable but not enormous step above at 23 percent. That said, while this shows that Symbian has fallen by 2 percent in its own market share, iOS has maintained about the same strength. This suggests that Apple isn’t necessarily advancing as much as Android is taking on some of Symbian’s former market share.