Market intelligence firm IDC’s India Quarterly Mobile Handsets Tracker, for the 2nd quarter of 2010, 2010, finds shipments of mobile handsets in India grew by 6.3% quarter-on- to touch an all time high of 38.63 million units in a single quarter – but market leader Nokia is shown to have dropped 20 percent in the last 6 months, to retain a market share of 36.3%.

In its heyday – 2008 – the Finnish handset leader commanded 70 percent of the Indian market. It seems to have given space to Chinese and so called “Indian” vendors who mostly rebrand mopdels sourced from China. The Korean electronic giant Samsung retained the No. 2 position with 8.2 percent, while Chinese brand G’Five emerged as the No. 3 player(7.3 percent). India brands Micromax and Spice are number 4 and 5.

Says Anirban Banerjee, Associate Vice President-Research, IDC India: “In the recent quarters several new players successfully launched their own devices at significantly lower Average Selling Values (ASVs) in the price sensitive India market. Such handsets found ready acceptance amongst first time buyers, especially from small towns and villages.” Such ‘emerging vendors’ corner as much as 33.2% of total India mobile handset shipments in 2Q 2010.

Adds Naveen Mishra, Lead Telecoms Analyst, IDC India, “The India mobile market saw a unique trend of multi SIM phones capturing 38.5 per cent of the market from less than 1% in 2Q 2009 (April-June 2009 quarter).This could be attributed to several new service providers responding with highly competitive tariff plans to a price sensitive mobile telephony user market.”

Nokia India refutes IDC report on market share http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/telecom/Nokia-India-refutes-IDC-report-on-marketshare/articleshow/6652153.cms