New Delhi: India's smartphone shipments rose over 219 per cent to 14.5 million units in January-March this year with more than half of the handsets shipped being 3G enabled, research firm CyberMedia Research (CMR) said.
The country saw smartphone shipments of 6.6 million units in the year-ago period, CMR said in a statement. However, on a quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q), smartphone shipments rose a mere 1.9 per cent from 14.2 million units in October-December 2013, it added.
Overall, 58.9 million mobile handsets were shipped during Q1 2014, a year-on-year growth of 8.9 per cent, but witnessed a q-o-q decline of 16.4 per cent (70.4 million mobile phones were shipped in Q4 2013), CMR said.
Feature phone shipments declined by 6.5 per cent to 44.4 million units in the first quarter this year from 47.5 million in the year-ago period. Q-o-q the fall was more pronounced at 21.1 per cent from 56.2 million units in October-December 2013.
"The India smartphones market during Q1 2014 saw a marginal growth in shipments of 1.9 per cent over Q4 2013, taking the contribution of smartphones to overall shipments to 24.6 per cent. Further, as many as 68.3 per cent of the smartphones shipped in the country during Q1 CY 2014 were 3G-enabled smartphones," the market research firm said.
India smartphones market is growing at a significant pace and consumer buying patterns and preferences are continuously evolving. The next wave of demand will come from consumers who are data hungry and want to use their device for wide range of activities, CMR Telecoms Practice Analyst Devices Tarun Pathak said.
"Hence, in such a scenario those vendors will be successful who focus on providing a great device experience to users, rather than simply marketing their offerings on the basis of certain set of specifications," he added.
In smartphones, Samsung (43.2 per cent) lead the race followed by local handset players Micromax (17.5 per cent) and Karbonn (5.2 per cent) at the second and third spots, respectively.
Overall in mobilephones, the Korean electronics giant (20.3 per cent) was again the leader followed by Nokia (17.6 per cent) and Micromax (11.2 per cent).
