Tablet Market In India Shrinks More Than 32% In January-March Quarter, 2014

The tablet market in India declined 32.8% for the first quarter of CY2014 to 0.78 million units due to lack of new buyers, according to the research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

Karan Thakkar, IDC’s senior market analyst of tablets, enterprise client devices and PC monitors, said that the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) compliance was hurting the white-box market. According to him, branded vendors were unable to capitalise on the space left vacant by the scrapping of white-box and smaller vendors.

As per BIS’ amended certification rules, companies have to screen-print or engrave labels on products and packaging materials. The revised rules also mandate font size of the letters (12 or one-fourth the size of the brand name or whichever is lower), the IDC said. Any alteration to the hardware design of the product has to be done at the source location as most of the tablet vendors import shipments, the IDC added.

Samsung leads the tablet market in India, the company said.
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