India is expected to oust the United States and become the second largest smartphone market in the world over the next two years. Strategy Analytics projects that 118 million smartphones will be sold in the Indian market this year. The latest figures from Cybex confirm what has been reflected before in previous surveys and reports and what we have all known all along: there is a strong preference for homegrown smartphone brands. Save for the recent disruption by an influx of hard-to-beat devices from Chinese brands like Xiaomi, the likes of Micromax have made Samsung change tact in a market as key as India.
It is this strong love coupled with the huge market potential and the cut in spending that come with doing fewer imports that makes it sensible to better target the consumer from the inside. Over one and a half years ago, Huawei applied for a license to manufacture smartphones in India, and it received communication from the Indian authorities recently granting it the permission to do so. While our focus is obviously on the smartphone bit, the license allows Huawei to make just about any telecom equipment and with the company’s network infrastructure business being one of its key components, this means a lot not just to India but other markets as well. With India boasting of over 975 million mobile phone subscriptions, it is obvious that smartphones are central in the company’s focus.
Getting a hold of the hot Indian smartphone market will help the Shenzhen-based technology company to make up for the sluggish growth back at home that is as a result of the smartphone market saturation.
No serious global hardware or software player can afford to ignore the huge Indian smartphone market today. – IDC
