Global smartphone growth is set to lose some pace because of the economic slowdown in China, and India, which has emerged as the fastest growing market in the world and left China behind in the race of smartphone sales, can do little or nothing to help it.
While India has surpassed China's pace of smartphone sales, it is still far from replacing the neighbour as the growth driver for the global handset industry, because of the comparatively smaller size of the Indian market, and the fact that majority of the user base is settler in rural areas, bringing in lower revenue.
The fact that India still sells only as many phones in a year that China sells in a quarter is enough to hint at the vast difference in the sizes of two markets. Other than this, India's average selling price (ASP) of smartphones, which stands at $132, is almost half of that of China, and the chances of it growing soon are pretty dull because of, again, rural market using basic phones.
Overall global smartphone sales have already dipped and will dip further to 7% on year in 2016 from 14% in 2015. The reason behind this fall is flat sales in China and North America, which is the second largest smartphone market.
"Being an emerging market, there will always be a demand for feature phones and entry-level smartphones in India, whereas in China, majority market is replacement smartphones which have higher ASP," Sanjay Kumar Kalirona, head of mobile business at Intex Technologies told ET.
"So, there will always be a gap between India and China in value terms, even if volumes were to be same," he added.
The mere fact that India's largest home-grown player Micromax wants to enter the China market to ensure its smooth passage into world’s top-five players is enough to understand the importance of
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