Smartphone sales to reach 160 mn in FY17: ASSOCHAM

Sales of smartphones in India are set to shoot up to 160 million in the fiscal year 2017, up from 100 million in the fiscal year 2016 on the back of prices becoming affordable for a larger number of people, coupled with replacement of ordinary phones with the smart devices at a rapid pace, according to an ASSOCHAM study.

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Smartphone sales almost more than doubled from 44 million units in 2013 to 100 million units in 2016.

The study also pointed out that the rise of smartphones is eating into the demand for the digital camera which witnessed a drop in sales by more than 35% per cent in the last one year. Affordable smartphones includes handsets in the price of Rs 4000-10,000. This segment accounts for 78 percent of all smartphone sales equipped with almost similar features which one may get in these sub-Rs 10,000 cameras, and thus need for digital cameras has almost vanished.

According to survey, most of the respondents said that the biggest advantage of clicking pictures with smartphones is that they can be shared instantly with your friends and family; a feature which is absent with most of the point and short cameras.

“The technology is changing at such a fast pace that the product developers have to think ahead of times; or else the top selling products of the present times can become outdated, without the manufacturers and those dominating the market today realising it, ” ASSOCHAM Secretary D S Rawat said.

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He said, another feature of the smart devices market in India is that the country has a huge telephone subscribers’ base of about a billion users who are becoming aspirational even at the bottom of pyramid.

About 93% of the customers now prefer Smartphones versus digital camera. The smart phones are becoming the main camera of choice by large number of people and increasingly more consumers are relying on their smartphones instead of compact Digital Cameras for both still photos and video capture

Almost 75% of the sales of mobiles and tablets came from consumers’ residing in Tier-I and Tier –II cities.

As per study, personal Computer, MP3 players sales have already started declining, the impact of smartphone and tablet adoption so great that the number of users accessing the Internet through PCs starts falling.

The Digital camera sale has suddenly come down due to large numbers of brands of smart phones at affordable price with multiple buying options. Soaring popularity of smartphones is crushing demand for digital compact cameras amongst the young. The compact camera market is going to keep shrinking in the coming years to come, the ASSOCHAM paper said.

There has been a subsequent rise in the demand of smart phones in India in the last one year and one of the reasons behind this growing importance is largely due to the increase in social networking site, the study said