4G enabled smartphone shipments overtakes 3G based devices for the first time in October 2015, says IDC

22 Dec 2015

India, December **** 21 st , 2015 – According to International Data Corporation’s (IDC ) India monthly smartphone tracker, 9.3 million smartphones were shipped in India in the month of October 2015, coming off from a healthy September of over 10 million unit shipments. This decline could be attributed to incremental supplies witnessed during last weeks of September as the channels prepared for October’s festive demand and online mega sales from major ecommerce players.

Click to T weet : 4G enabled smartphone shipments overtakes 3G based devices for the first time in October 2015, says IDC #IDCIn

“Owing to attractive discounts and offers during online mega sales, online shipments of smartphones grew 12.1 percent in October over the previous month. This boosted the online share further from 33.5 percent in September 2015 to 41.2 percent in October 2015, primarily driven by Samsung and Lenovo,” says Karthik J , Senior Market Analyst, Client Devices , IDC India.

Karthik further adds that, “online mega sales not only encouraged vendors to increase shipments online, but also facilitated the launch of many new models to accommodate the huge end user demand during the month of October.”

Samsung’s On5 and On7, Lenovo’s Vibe P1, Oneplus 2, Apple’s iphone 6s are few of the many new models that incrementally contributed to the online volume in October 2015.

These array of new models also contributed to a sharp spike in 4G share of smartphones in October. According to Kiran Kumar , Research Manager , Client Devices , IDC India says, “With 25.9 percent month-on-month growth, 4G based smartphone accounted for more than half of smartphones shipped in October. This gain is mainly at the expense of 3G enabled handsets as vendors are replacing their existing models with 4G based smartphones while making consumers future proof.”

Shipments of Top 3 Chinese vendors namely Lenovo Gr oup, Xiaomi and Vivo **** together grew at a healthy 18 percent month-over-month in October. Lenovo Group is one of the key driver for this growth with considerable volume of shipments coming from their new line up of smartphones like A1000, Vibe P1, A6010, etc.On the other hand, in October, more than half of Xiaomi’s smartphones shipped in India were locally manufactured and with Redmi Note Prime too joining local production line up, this share is only expected to go up.

IDC anticipates November to have maintained a similar shipment run-rate. Traction of 4G based smartphones will only grow further as Reliance Jio’s 4G based phones are expected to hit the market by end of CY 2015.

For more information on the "India Mobile Phone market" please contact Kiran Kumar, Research Manager, kkumar@idc.com or Karthik J, Sr.Market Analyst, karthik.j@idc.com **