India joins the league of major mobile services markets across the globe featuring their own mobile device brands to leverage the phenomenal rise in the demand for these devices. According to Counterpoint Technology Research, an independent market research and consulting firm, their latest research from the Market Monitor program showed that two-thirds of the total mobile phone shipments and over half of the smartphone shipments for India is attributable to local brands. Canalys, another analysis company, reported a similar situation in China, where 8 out of the 10 top smartphone vendors in the country are local vendors.
Counterpoint said that the smartphone market in India grew by 68% in the last year, though demand for its predecessor, the feature phone, fell by 16% in the last quarter. According to Counterpoint, Micromax, India's own brand, came out top in the overall phone segment and the feature phone segment, and second after Samsung, in the smartphone segment with a market share of 16.6%, 15.2% and 19.1% respectively for the last quarter. Other players in the handset segment are Karbonn, Motorola, Celkon, Nokia, Apple, Sony and Lava. By taking over top global brands such as Nokia and Samsung, Micromax is set to dominate the India mobile market in a big way, and is already the world's 10th largest supplier of mobile phones in terms of volume, added Canalys.
According to Counterpoint, the trend, both in India and China shows the onset of more intensified competition in the mobile device space, specifically the smartphone segment with Asian OEMs such as Xiaomi, Gionee, Huawei and Asus laying out aggressive plans to venture abroad and capitalize on the demand for competitively-prices, premium smartphones. More information on the research is available here.