Mobile market in India driven by dual-SIM handsets: IDC

Although pioneered by local handset manufacturers, Nokia has gained success with its dual-SIM phones in India, with its mobile shipment market share growing 6.8 per cent in Q3 to 31.8 per cent according to IDC.

Dual-SIM devices which according to Recon Analytics represent about 30 per cent of the mobile devices sold in India, grew 25 per cent in the third quarter from Q2, the report said.

Overall, the Indian mobile phone market grew 12 per cent in units shipped over the previous quarter to 47.1 million units. Year-on-year figures showed a shipment growth of 13.8 per cent.

"Notwithstanding a sharp decline in the mobile service subscription adds during July-Sept 2011, the mobile phone shipments witnessed a spurt, as vendors built channel inventories ahead of a long festival season. Dual-SIM handset shipments were notable with a sequential growth of 25.2 per cent over the previous quarter," said Deepak Kumar, research director at IDC India.

Samsung too increased its smartphone shipment share by 5 per cent over the previous quarter, closing the gap with Nokia. While Samsung's overall phone market share is 17.5 per cent compared with Nokia's 31.8 per cent, in the smartphone segment, Samsung has 26 per cent market share compared with Nokia's 35.3 per cent share. 

"The slowdown of Nokia's smartphones shipment is in line with the expectations, that it would be prepping to transition some of its market share from Symbian to Windows," Kumar added.

For the first time, Google's mobile OS, Android has also overtaken Nokia's Symbian as India's top platform with 42.4 per cent of the smartphone market, said IDC's lead analyst for mobile phones G Rajeev.

Several of the Indian and Chinese brands registered varying declines in shipments. Spice and MAXX were notable exceptions and saw shipment growths of 34.1 per cent and 10.5 per cent respectively, over the previous quarter of April-June 2011 (Q2).

The year is expected to close with mobile shipments of around 184.4 million units. IDC forecasts the market to clock 301 million by close of 2015 at a CAGR of 13 per cent. The smartphone segment is forecast to see a much higher CAGR of 63.4 per cent during the same period and to achieve a shipment of 77.5 million by 2015, concluded the report.