This might sound as surprising but, yet Indian domestic mobile device brands (yes, we mean more than one brand) are finally taking over the International brands.
Micromax has ranked second by shipments, Karbonn has ranked fifth according to IDC. Micromax increased shipments to 633,000 smartphones in the last quarter of 2012 from 9,990 a year earlier, while Karbonn grew to 304,000 from zero reports newyork.newsday. The sales are being driven by first-time smartphone buyers in India, according to a report published Friday by Bloomberg.
The reason behind this is low pricing of the phones, which is facilitated by the free and open source Android operating system platform, and the will of these companies to launch good products into the market.
We hope you remember that during the last year quarter ending June 30, almost 0.55 million tablets were sold across India. 18.4 per cent of the devices sold in the quarter were from Micromax. The report states that the affordable price of the Micromax Funbook has been one of the key products bringing this change. This finding came through a Cyber Media research last year.
Competitors like Micromax and Karbonn (need we mention others like Lava, Intex and half a dozen of others) have been going aggressive about their market presence and are offering smartphones at price points which a consumer finds difficult to resist. While the International giants go in for a price tag of Rs 30,000 or Rs 40,000 (we need not mention the price of latest iPhone 5 and BlackBerry Z10 in India which is about Rs 43500), the domestic manufacturers introduce handsets at a price range which is one half or one third of the International brands.
India is one of the biggest telecom market in the world. It will become the third-largest smartphone market by 2017, according to the Framingham, Mass.-based researcher IDC, after China and US, says newyork.newsday. Though in India we have seen that the mobile phone has transformed from being a family gadget to a personal gadget. Yet in the country which is populated by an expensive mobile phone is still a luxury which is not-affordable.
Tell us, who can resist a quad-core 5-incher phone running the Android Jelly Bean operating system and sporting at least an 8 megapixel camera at Rs 15000 or Rs 11000? (This if you have not heard of the 5-incher dual SIM single-core Canvas Viva at Rs 6999) The price barrier is something which the International giants, who are known for launching awesome devices every year, have not been able to break till date in India. Though recently we have seen Nokia (Nokia Asha is already a popular budget phone in Indian market) and Sony going for budget phones with its budget Lumia and budget Xperia phones aimed at people who don’t want to spend a fortune on a phone.
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