4G-enabled device shipments to get boost in India

Shipment of 4G devices in the country grew 18 per cent to over 18.2 million in April-June period of this year from 15.4 million units in the previous quarter, research firm CMR said last week.

CMR expects the cumulative shipment of 4G devices to be around 125 million this year. Of the total shipment, smartphones accounted for 97.8 per cent, followed by data cards (1.6 per cent) and Tablet PCs (0.6 per cent). Samsung led the smartphone market with about 41 per cent market share, while Micromax and LYF had 8.6 per cent and 8.5 per cent share, respectively.

According to CMR, second tier of handset manufacturers like Vivo, Oppo, LeEco, Gionee, OnePlus and InFocus are expected to double their 4G shipments in the coming quarters to meet the surge in demand as Reliance Jio's 4G service goes live.

Reliance Jio, the latest entrant in the Indian telecom market, has partnered a number of handset makers including Micromax, Panasonic and Asus for its service in the past few weeks. It has its own 'LYF' brand of smartphones.

"With services becoming live, it will be now more of a concern for operators, especially Jio (since it is a 4G only network) to actually see the ecosystem gets widened and encourage more and more handset players to come onboard and ramp up their shipments," CMR Principal Analyst for Telecoms Faisal Kawoosa said.

"We may see about 25-30 4G smartphone models with different variants getting launched in the second half of this year and content and video consumption getting a boost with 4G," CMR Analyst Telecoms Krishna Mukherjee said.

4G is also likely to revitalise the tablets and data cards segments, Mukherjee added.

In tablets, Samsung held 40 per cent market share, followed by Apple (30.8 per cent) and iBall (8.3 per cent).

Huawei, ZTE and Micromax held 63.4 per cent, 20 per cent and 16.4 per cent market share respectively of the data card market in the second quarter of 2016.