Smartphone sales zoom in India, flatten out in China and the US

Photo credit: Pixabay.

The world’s fastest growing mobile market, India shows no sign of slowing down – even as China and the US reach saturation point. Gartner says smartphone sales will flatten out in China and North America but zoom up by 29 percent in India this year.

Overall, global smartphone sales will slow down to single digit growth at 7 percent in 2016.

Users upgrading from basic phones to premium phones will slow.

“The double-digit growth era for the global smartphone market has come to an end,” says Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. “Historically, worsening economic conditions had negligible impact on smartphone sales and spend, but this is no longer the case. China and North America smartphone sales are on pace to be flat in 2016, exhibiting a 0.7 percent and 0.4 percent growth respectively.”

Even in Asia’s emerging markets, growth is slowing down as users delay upgrades to smartphones. “Users are likely to hold onto phones, especially as the technology updates become incremental rather than exponential,” says Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner. “In addition, the volumes of users upgrading from basic phones to premium phones will slow.”

But the research firm expects India to maintain double digit growth in the next two years following the 29 percent hike this year.

Shift to smartphones

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Only 17 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people own smartphones, according to a recent Pew Research study, compared to 43 percent globally. What it means is that there is a lot more room for growth in India.

This in turn augurs well for the growth of mobile commerce and other mobile-first or mobile-only businesses in India. The winners will be the ones who get their mobile strategy right in this period of growth and transition. But that’s easier said than done.

Flipkart, India’s ecommerce giant, took its fashion app Myntra app-only in May last year but abandoned the experiment in February. The company then launched a revamped mobile website which has been getting good traction from the word go. We can expect to see more experiments and shifts in strategy going forward.