Top 5 Indian Vendors Accounted For 19% Of Mobile Shipments In Q2 2011

The top five Indian vendors -  Karbonn, Micromax, Lava, Spice and MAXX - accounted for a share of 19 per cent of the overall shipments. This performance could also extend into the smartphone segment in future as they add low-cost smartphones on the Android platform to their portfolio. Micromax had earlier made its presence felt in the Indian market by overtaking LG to become the third largest player in terms of revenues for FY2010-11, behind Nokia and Samsung.

"India-based vendors have particularly been busy planning their debuts in the smartphone category, so some of their energies were expectedly absorbed there. A certain degree of gear-shifting for an awaited smartphone play is on the cards and the results will be visible in the next few quarters," said Deepak Kumar, Research Director at IDC.

Also, Samsung witnessed the strongest smart phone shipment growth during the quarter, thanks to its popular Galaxy series of handsets. As of Q2, 2011, the manufacturer had 21 per cent of the smart phone market share, and 15 per cent of the overall mobile phone market.

It follows close behind Nokia, which leads both the mobile phone market and the smartphone segments, with 25 per cent and 45.8 per cent shares, respectively. In the smartphone segment, RIM occupied the third place with a share of 15 per cent, according to research firm IDC.

One of the major developments in the quarter was that smartphones with average sales values of Rs 18,000 and above witnessed a significant growth of 31 per cent over the preceding quarter and a 96 per cent growth over the year-ago quarter.

The smartphone segment showed an impressive growth of 68 per cent year-on-year and a marginal growth of 0.4 per cent over the Jan-March 2011 quarter, to garner a share of 5.6 per cent of the overall mobile phone market. This is up from 3.6 per cent in unit terms from the same period in the previous year.

A total of 42.8 million mobile phone units were shipped in Q2 2011, an increase of 6 per cent compared to Q2 2010 (although the shipments saw a decline of 3 per cent in comparison to Q1 2011). The calendar year (CY) 2011 is expected to close with mobile phone shipments of around 187 million units.

"Shipments cooled down a bit in the April-June quarter of 2011, partly due to an inventory build-up from the preceding quarters and partly because vendors apparently paused to take a relook at their product portfolio strategies," added Kumar.

OS:

When viewed from an operating system (OS) perspective, the smartphone segment saw a significant traction for Apple's iOS platform, which captured a share of 2.6 per cent in Q2 2011, whereas in terms of growth momentum, Android led with the highest growth rate of 10 per cent, quarter-on-quarter.

Projections:

The total number of mobile phone shipments could increase to 328 million by 2015, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.5 per cent during the period of 2010-2015. Individually, the smartphone segment could increase at a CAGR of 68.4 per cent during the same period and ship 81.5 million units by 2015.