Smartphone sales tripled in India in 2013; global decline projected by 2018

With consumers moving away from feature phones, smartphones sales in India shot up in 2013.

In its annual report on Wednesday, IDC said the smartphone shipment in the country nearly tripled last year, as against 2012, with 44 million smartphones in all, shipped in India, mostly in low and mainstream segments, which marked a big increase from 16.2 million in 2012.

In terms of year-on-year quarterly growth, Q4 of 2013 saw a 181-per cent jump in the number of smartphones shipped in the country, while the overall phone market notched a growth of 18 per cent, with 257 million phones shipped in 2013 as against 218 million in 2012.

Manasi Yadav, senior market analyst at IDC India, the growth in the smartphone market was being propelled by the launch of low-end , cost-competitive devices by international and local vendors who were narrowing the price gaps that existed between feature phones and smartphones, The Times of India reported.

Given that a bulk (78 per cent) of the phone market in India still consisted of feature phones, 2014 was likely to witness similar explosive growth in smartphone adoption and according to UK research agency Mediacells, which projects Indian consumers to buy 225 million smartphones in 2014, the report said.

Meanwhile, growth in global smartphone shipments was set to fall sharply this year and keep slowing through 2018, according to research.

Growth in global smartphone shipments could be down from 39.2 per cent last year to 19.3 per cent this year, 8.3 per cent in 2017, and 6.2 per cent in 2018, according to global market firm International Data Corporation (IDC) in its latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report.

IDC added that average prices would fall significantly with demand shifting to China and other developing countries.

Android would retain its edge as the leading operating system pushing Apple's iOS to the second-most popular platform after Android in 2018.

2014 would also mark a huge transition for the smartphone market.

In addition to an unprecedented decline in growth, the driving forces behind smartphone adoption too would change.

According to a statement by IDC programme director Ryan Reit, new markets for growth brought different rules to play by and 'premium' would not be a major faction in the region's overall market growth.

According to IDC's projections Windows Phone's global market share would rise from 3.9 per cent this year to 7 per cent in 2018.