Smartphones will make up about 25% of the total Indian mobile phone market by 2015, ‘Research and Markets’ has predicted.
The research firm said sales of smartphones in India will grow at 60% every year on average till 2015, while overall mobile handset sales will grow at about 13% per year.
It estimated smartphone volumes in India at about 11.2 million last year, implying a 5% share in the overall market that has been estimated at about 200 million.
Smartphones are phones that run on independent operating systems such as Google’s Android, Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS etc..
They are more similar to computers as they support the installation of standard applications instead of custom-made applications.
Smart phones however, tend to be costly as running independent operating systems requires the phones to have strong hardware specifications, such as a powerful cpu, a graphics processor etc..
Samsung leads the smartphone market, followed by Apple, with its iPhone.
India is the second largest mobile handset market in the world, after China.
Research and Markets estimates that the total value of all handsets sold in India in 2010-11 was $6.75 billion, up 15% from 2009-10 sales.
“The mature Indian mobile consumers’ increasing preference for high-end handsets and the younger demographics’ desire to use mobile Web technologies could see the smartphone markets revenues soar,” it noted.