Festive season: Phablets make a mark

Chennai: Heavy discount offers during the festival season resulted in a spike in smartphone sales in the country with phablets ruling the roost. The third quarter saw domestic smartphone market grow by 229 per cent over last year.

Vendors shipped a total of 12.8 million smartphones in the third quarter compared to 3.8 million units in the same period of 2012.

This was 28 per cent increase over the units shipped in the second quarter of 2013, according to Internatio-nal Data Corporation’s Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

The 5-inch to 6.99-inch screen size phablets continued to show sustained growth this quarter as well, accounting for 23 per cent of the overall market in volume terms while the overall mobile phone market showed a 12 per cent growth.

“The growth in the smartphone market continues to drive the overall growth numbers for the phone market — given that there’s still a huge potential for smartphone penetration in India, this trend is expected to continue in the coming quarters”, said Manasi Yadav, senior market analyst at IDC India.

The third quarter of 2013 witnessed a slowdown in the numbers for top local vendors such as Micromax and Karbonn — while international vendors like Samsung and Nokia made up for close to 30 per cent powered by their new product launches.

“The change agents for this rapid shift of consumer preference towards smartphones have been the narrowing price gap between feature phones and smartphones. The smartphone market is expected to maintain these elevated levels of growth in the near future” said Kiran Kumar, research manager with IDC India.

Samsung maintained its leadership spot with about 33 per cent in terms of market share. Micromax held on to its second spot with about 17 per cent in terms of market share.

While Karbonn garnered the third spot with 11 per cent share, the Nokia Lumia range of devices garnered close to 5 per cent market share. For the first time, Lava made it to the top five.