Galloping growth in Indian smartphone market: Zinnov

09th April 2015
Galloping growth in Indian smartphone market: Zinnov

Bangalore, April 10, 2015: The unstoppable surge of smartphones in India continues with 29% of urban population with a base of 409 million users adding to its adoption.
Leading Management Consulting firm, Zinnov, has released a  study on  Smartphone adoption in the country which finds  India  at the cusp of digitization,mainly driven by mobility.
The study titled “India Smartphone Market:Witnessing Exponential Growth”, brought to light the various factors that are propelling the smartphone adoption at an exponential pace in India.
Growing competition resulting in price reductions; the ease of access of content and language localization; government Incentives through “Make in India” and prevalence of internet-enabled services on smartphones are some of the reasons for this propelling growth.
The released study read that approximately 81 million smartphones were shipped in the year 2014, making it a 51% Quarter-on-Quarter growth.
Smartphones are already outpacing the growth of feature phones and are expected to show a massive 36% CAGR over the next 5 years making it to the 651 million mark by 2019.
The study highlighted that smartphone users in Mini Metros and Tier-I/II cities match their Large Metro counterparts’ w.r.t. usage ofOnline Apps and Browsing.
While Chinese brandsare gaining prominence, with Xiaomi recently surpassing all other brands in sale of 4G LTE smartphones, local brand  Micromax is also threatening the dominance of Samsung in the domain.
"With consumers spoilt for choice,domestic smartphone vendors will have to increasingly focus on streamlining operational processes and investing in R&D fordifferentiation", says Arvind Rawat, Engagement Manager-MarketExpansion Advisory, Zinnov.
Smartphone vendors are also adopting new and innovating Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies like Online Exclusive (eg: Motorola on Flipkart), Experience centres to facilitate customer experience (eg: 100 experience centres planned by Xiaomi in India), Brick & Motor model where vendors are pushing retail expansion (eg: 250 retail stores planned by Gionee in India), and hardware differentiation in order to gain traction in the highly competitive Indian market.