Nokia loses 12% share to Indian handset manufacturers

Max, Micromax, Karbonn, Lava, Lemon, Spice – the world is not yet familiar with these names which have recently cropped up in the Indian telecom league. But these local manufacturers with completely indigenous marketing strategies added up to 14% market share by revenue in India’s mobile handset market in 2009-10, according to the Voice & Data  (V&D) 100 Indian Telecom Survey.

This number is up sharply from about 3-4% total share by these same brands in the previous year.
The Indian brands included Micromax (4.1% handset market share by revenue), Spice (3.9%), Karbonn (3%), Lava (1.1%), Lemon (1%) and Max (0.9%). Compared with last year, these Indian brands gained a cumulative 10 percentage points of market share in the very competitive Indian market. Samsung gained seven points, and Nokia lost 12 percentage points of precious share. The newly popular Indian handsets in question are locally branded models sourced from manufacturers in China or Taiwan.
Voice & Data pointed out the availability of all-QWERTY Blackberry look-alikes complete with trackball, and even dual-SIM phones, for Rs 5,000. The survey observed a rising demand for dual-SIM phones last year, but the market leaders had few offerings in that space. While Nokia has many low-cost models, the survey pointed out they were relatively sparse on features.
There is no doubt there are still areas to be covered in terms of applications and functionality, user interface, experience and, often, quality of construction, solidity and robustness,. But with the short life span of handsets today, many buyers are willing to experiment.
The mobile handset market grew 4.2% by revenue during FY 2009-10 (compared with 7.9% in 2008-09, and 11.9% in 2007-08). The low revenue growth hides the large numbers sold, but reflects the fact that most sales are of low-priced handsets and that the average sale price (ASP) has been dropping each year.
Around 108 million mobile phones were sold in India during 2009-10.
Growing even more rapidly than the number of handset sales in 2009-10, was the number of mobile subscribers. The country added 192 million mobile subscribers in the fiscal year. A large number of subscribers have more than one SIM card, and an increasing number are using dual-SIM phones.
Nokia remained the market leader with 52% share. Samsung remained the second largest handset vendor, with 17.4% market share, followed by LG at 5.9%. Sony Ericsson slipped badly last year, with very few options in the low- and mid-range handset segments.