The mobile handset segment in India saw two significant changes in the April-June quarter. First was the news about Micromax overtaking Samsung as the largest seller of handset, and the second was the success of Motorola with its new Moto G where they selected to sell though e-commerce route only using Flipkart.
Changes in Smart Phone Market Share
As per Counterpoint Technology which is a market research firm in Hong Kong, in this quarter handset market share of Micromax was at 16.6% while it was 14.4% for Samsung with Nokia at 3rd position with market share of 10.9%. In this context, vice president of Samsung India said that the company is taking steps to grow their market share by improving the product portfolio they have.
If we look at the smart phone market share, Samsung is still the leader with 25% market share followed by Micromax with 19% and Karbonn with 6% share of the market while Motorola raised its market share to 4.3%, leaving behind Nokia at 4%. In another survey by Canalys, it was found that there is good competition between Motorola and Nokia with Motorola selling 1.3 million smart phones and Nokia 1.2 million in the last 2 quarters.
Competition between Nokia and Motorola
In this quarter Motorola went ahead of Nokia in terms of units shipped, while Motorola made 950,000 units, figures for Nokia stood at 630,000 units. However, in the previous quarter figures for Nokia were higher at 580,000 units in comparison to 370,000 units sold by Motorola. Samsung was way ahead of its competitors with 4.4 million units with Micromax making 3.1 million units.
New Entrants in the Market
Some of the new Chinese entrants in the market such as Xiaomi are also showing good promise with sale of around 20,000 units within 2 weeks, with weekly stock getting sold with 5 seconds. Similar to Motorola they are also selling their smart phones only through Flipkart. Another player in the mobile market which is using Flipkart in addition to selling in retail outlets is Alcatel and their stock of newly launched smart phone was sold out with a within a day itself.
In the coming days we can expect the competition to become fierce with the entry of other Asian players in the market such as Asus and Huawei which will help to reduce the prices further, providing users with more options to select from.
As we can see, Motorola is making good strides in the Indian smart phone market using the e-commerce route and other makers are showing interest in increasing their online sales.
