With nearly as many smartphone users as the U.S. has people, India is already one of the world’s hottest mobile markets, with America’s Apple, Korea’s Samsung, China’s Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi jostling for market share with Indian brands such as Micromax.
India’s 300 million smartphone users could grow by more than 50% in the next few years, reports CNN Tech giving reasons for this:
- One billion Indians do not yet have a smartphone — a huge market opportunity.
- More than 66% of India’s 1.3 billion people still don’t have access to the Internet, and when they do so over the next decade, it will likely be through mobile devices. “Mobile has already become the primary device from which users access the internet,” says Shobhit Srivastava, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, a global industry analysis firm headquartered in Hong Kong.
- India has many regional languages, and many of the country’s newest mobile users are discovering the Internet in one of them. “One of the major reasons the smartphone hasn’t been able to penetrate rural or [smaller] cities is because it’s all in English. You need to have the regional languages, and a lot of players have understood that. They are investing in putting regional languages in their smartphones, turning this challenge into a differentiating factor for themselves,” Srivastava added.
- India has more than 100 smartphone brands catering to a variety of budgets.
