This makes the country an attractive market to device manufacturers.
Smartphones in India are expected to account for 62 percent of all mobile phones sales in India in 2018, despite the cellular market undergoing consolidations and aggressive 4G roll out.
“With the slowdown in sales in major markets, including the U.S., China and mature Western Europe, India represents the largest opportunity because it is the second-largest mobile phone market after China,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner.
This makes the country an attractive market to device manufacturers.
The rise of digital currency is bringing a new use case for smartphones, which, in turn, is set to trigger higher demands for smartphones. This opens the opportunity for service providers to launch mobile wallet solution or even vendors to launch their exclusive mobile payment solutions like Android Pay or Apple Pay to build an ecosystem.
Samsung and Apple, have made exclusive plans to grow their shares in the market. Major Chinese manufacturers, such as Gionee, Huawei, Oppo, BBK (Vivo), Xiaomi, Lenovo etc., have committed big investments to exploit the growth opportunity.
Chinese manufacturers has not only troubled top local brands such as Micromax, Intex, Lava and Karbonn mobile but also resulted in a decrease in smartphone market share for Samsung in India.
“With an exclusive focus on the market from the device manufacturers, we expect more customized smartphones to come to market and remain key to win in this highly competitive market,” said Mr. Gupta.
The research firm also added that as opposed to earlier falling mobile phone average selling price (ASP) trends led by the rush to low cost mobile phone, it has noted a change in consumer spending.
“Our recently concluded consumer survey showed, users are willing to spend more to get a smartphone with better features than simply rushing for lowest price smartphones.”
According to the research firm, the smartphone market is still led by Samsung followed my Micromax and Lenovo respectively.