In the last couple of years, mobile data consumption in India has grown leaps and bounds and special credit goes to Reliance Jio here. According to a new report released by Nielsen India, smartphone users in the country are consuming an average of 1GB data per day. The report further added that smartphone users are spending more than 90 minutes on online activities daily across the entry-level, mid-range and premium segments. To recall, an average smartphone user consumed 4GB data a month a few years ago.
The Advent of 4G and Less Expensive Handsets Resulted in High-Data Usage
India has emerged among the most preferred smartphone markets in the world owing to affordable handset prices and low-cost data penetration, triggering a huge replacement demand among the customers across segments, the "Nielsen Smartphone 2018" report added.
"The advent of the high-speed 4G Internet, less-expensive mobile handsets and a correction in call data charges have encouraged the speedy adoption of smartphones in India," said Abhijit Matkar, Director-Technology IPG - Nielsen India reports IANS.
To meet the demand of the mass market, new Chinese and Indian handset makers have launched affordable handsets which are under Rs 5,000.
"This sudden influx of affordable smartphones created a whole segment of new consumers who either upgraded from feature phones or were new mobile users altogether," Matkar said in a statement.
Chat and VoIP Apps Dominate the Usage Chart
When it comes to app usage, chat and VoIP apps dominate usage across customer segment followed by browser apps. Interestingly, uTorrent Beta app dominates across categories when it comes of consumption of data, followed by YouTube across customer segments, the findings showed.
The smartphone users spend more than 90 minutes a day on online activities while the premium segment takes the usage up to 130 minutes per day. "The price of handsets and data is emerging as a remarkable surrogate for monitoring the ever-widening set of users and their smartphone usage, thereby facilitating business and marketing strategy for a better return on investment (ROI)", Matkar added.
Despite the availability of economically-priced smartphones, average smartphone prices are still increasing. "In fact, the average cost has steadily risen from about Rs 7,700 in 2015 to about Rs 10,000 in 2017," said the report.
The appetite for data consumption has risen over the last 15 to 18 months. The highest engagement occurs on apps that consume a lot of data like Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, Instagram and Google Chrome, the report added.
