It will be India vs China

This will be the most crucial year for Samsung and there is high probability that it could be dethroned as the market leader in the Smartphone segment.

In India, devices (Mobile Phones, Tablets and Dongles) are one of the important pillars of the Telecom Equipment Market. As per the V&DCMR Annual Industry Survey 2014, these constitute roughly 48% of the total Equipments market. At a time, when apparently not much is moving in the Telecom sector, or, it’s not moving at the expected pace, devices give the industry much required impetus.

As per CMR’s Market Review Reports for India, the devices are collectively expected to reach 270 million units by the end of December 2014. Needless to guess, that around 260 million of these are mobile devices while 7 million data cards are expected to be sold in this calendar year. Tablets have however, disappointed us compared to its momentum in 2013 and earlier. CMR expects close to 3.5 million Tablet sales in 2014.

Let’s have a look at what we expect the devices segment to shape up as in CY 2015.

Mobile Handsets: These will continue to dominate the devices. The growth will come mainly from the Smartphone segment while Feature phones will actually start dying. Within the Smartphones, the sub-10k and 10k to 15k segment will be the ones driving growth. And 4G / LTE devices will be the main attraction of the market. However, this would not be a high growth segment. Reason being, even when RJio launches its services ac acrossoss 800 c cities ties as announceda ou ced recently,ece t y, the network might not be accessed via Smartphones primarily. This is what the trends suggest, as of now.

From the screen size perspective, 5 inch and above will continue to be the most buzzing space. Essentially that would mean Phablets becoming almost synonymous to Smartphones. Due to dismal performance of Windows as an OS for mobiles, even with now a manufacturer’s push, we see market getting polarised among Android and iOS in the premium segment. Other OSs like Android One and Firefox are not going to take on impressively and will exhibit more or less similar performances.

This will be the most crucial year for Samsung and there is high probability that it could be dethroned as the marmar ket leader in the Smartphone segment. Samsung’s potential market share would be fragmented among several brands mainly coming from China. The Indian brands will continue their command over the market and it seems 2015 is going to be the fight between India versus China.

CMR expects that the market will cross 300 million mark in CY 2015, with every possibility of Smartphones touching half of it at 150 million if it continues to grow at the same momentum as in CY 2014 which is very highly likely.

Dongles: The Mi-Fi devices that started to pick up in CY 2014 will be something of great interest in CY 2015 as well – essentially, after the launch of 4G G/ / LTE servicesse ces ofo RJio.J o. These ese couldcou d be the medium for a majority of users accessing the high speed network. So, we could be seeing them becoming