G’Five, the biggest Chinese brand of mobile phones, has emerged as the fastest growing top-10 mobile brand in India last year, followed by Blackberry maker Research In Motion or RIM.
The numbers, released by the Voice & Data magazine, also points to local brand Micromax as having held on to its position as Number 3 after Nokia and Samsung. The numbers are calculated on the basis of the total value of all the mobile phones sold, not their number.
The overall market for user devices (including phones and tablets) grew 16%, but the leader, Nokia, remained at the same revenues in 2010-11 as in the previous year. As a result, its market share in mobile phones slipped to just 39% in the year ended March this year (all figures based on revenues.)
On the other hand, Samsung, which increased its market share to 17.2%, grew faster than the market — at 21.7%.
“Samsung’s success can be attributed to its rich product portfolio on various popular operating systems like Windows, Android and Bada. The company’s entry level smartphone ‘Wave’ and ‘Galaxy S’ have been hugely successful during the period. For FY2010-11, the company’s 3G phones contributed 5% of its entire sales,” Voice & Data said.
There was a big difference in the market share of the number two Samsung and the number three — Micromax. While Samsung had 17.2% of the market, Micromax had just 6.9% in the last year, but grew much faster at 43%.
RIM (Blackberry), which came in at fourth place, grew even faster 61% to corner 5.9% of the market or Rs 1,950 crore (~$450 million). It was followed by LG and G’Five, the latter growing at 75% to hit 4% of the total market.
The numbers, of course, are slanted towards companies like Samsung since they sell high priced phones, giving them a higher market share than they would have got if the share was calculated on the basis of number of handsets (not their value.)
Most other Indian brands including Lava, Intex and Zen have shown almost a flat growth, V&D, part of the Cyber Media group, added.
It, however, believes that the current year may see big changes as domestic handset players like Maxx, Karbonn and Micromax may finally start making their phones in India itself, as their plants get ready.
The total user device market (including phones, tablets, data cards etc..) was Rs 34,722 crore, a jump of 16.04%, in 2010-11.
Out of this, mobile data card market (netconnect, broadband+, photon+ etc.) grew at 52.3% to Rs 1077 crore with Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE garnering Rs 630 crore and Rs 374 crore from this segment. The fixed phone market accounted for Rs 228 crore of the total.
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