"Nokia leads handset sales in India, Samsung king in smartphones"

Nokia’s flagship Lumia Phone. Reuters

New Delhi: India’s mobile handsets sales crossed 50 million units in the Jan-March quarter, up 9.1 percent from the like period of the previous year, with Nokia retaining its leadership position with 23 percent market share, a study showed Tuesday.

“The overall India mobile handsets market registered sales of 50.2 million units during January-March 2012,” said CyberMedia Research India Monthly Mobile Handsets Market Review for the quarter 2012.

“In the overall India mobile handsets market, Nokia retained leadership position with 23 percent share, followed by Samsung at second position with 14.1 percent and Micromax at third position with 5.8 percent in terms of sales (unit shipments),” it added.

The smartphone sales touched 2.7 million units during the period under review with Samsung emerging as the leader with 40.4 percent market share followed by Nokia and RIM with 25.5 percent and 12.3 percent shares respectively.

“As the India mobile handsets market grows in maturity, the needs of users are clearly seen to be converging around two major form factors — high-power, high-speed smartphones vis-a-vis value-plus, content-enabled featurephones,” said Anirban Banerjee, associate vice president, research and advisory services, CyberMedia Research.

“While most players are strong in a particular category, Samsung and others have been able to maintain a strong presence across the spectrum, driven mainly by innovation, quick time-to-market and a segmented approach,” he added.

The study also said that shipments of multi-SIM handset category continued to rise, accounting for as much as 67.7 percent of total shipments during the quarter.

However, even more significantly, total shipments of 3G-enabled mobile handsets in the country touched 4.7 million units during the period. With this there was a decline of 7.8 percent against the previous quarter.

According to the study while smartphones made up 5.3 percent of units sold and almost a quarter of total handset revenues. Multi-SIM handsets accounted for two-thirds of total sales and 3G phone sales accounted for under 10 percent of total sales.