Indian handset market suffers loss in 2009
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Low sales in the first six months of 2009 brought down the India’s mobile handset market which registered a sale of just 101.54 million units.
With 54.1% share, Finnish handset maker Nokia occupied the top slot in terms of unit sold in 2009 while Korean handset maker came second with 9.7% share and LG with a 6.4% share for the year ended December 31, 2009 reached the third spot.
In the fourth quarter from October to December, some sign of improvement was noticed, as the sale of the units increased 2.3% to touch 28.36 million units. 12.3% of the mobile market was occupied by the new vendors. The total number of the new handset vendors in India has reached 28 and they occupied 17.5% of the total sales for the first time during the October-December 2009 quarter.
According to Naveen Mishra, lead analyst, Mobile Handsets Research organization, the mobile handsets market got even more crowded and fragmented at the lower-and mid-market segments with the rise of ‘copycat’ models that have looks and aesthetics resembling those of high-end smartphones and these ‘copycat’ look-alikes are often available for as little as one-tenth of the average sales value (ASV) of a smartphone.
Gulf handset market has reached saturation
Muscat: The mobile handset market in the GCC has reached saturation and is forcing manufacturers to come up with even more features for phones, according to a top executive from Samsung.
“There may be new operators coming into the GCC, but the overall market for handsets has saturated,” Steve Han, general manager of Samsung Gulf Electronics’ Mobile Division, told Gulf News.
He added that over 80 per cent of the GCC market was already covered, leaving little room for manoeuvre.
Mukkul Shyam, COO, Cellucom, however, sees it differently. He believes that despite market saturation there is always scope for expansion.
“We have people migrating from low end models to high end models and some like to change their handset at a regular interval,” he pointed out, adding that in Kuwait a customer changes handset almost every six monthsIn the first six months of this year, Samsung, which has 13 to 14 per cent market share in the GCC, sold 600,000 handsets, recording a 22 per cent hike in sales compared to the same period in 2005.
“We hope to improve further with newer models like 10 mega pixel camera phone being launched soon,” Han said, adding that Samsung plans to launch a new model almost every month.
Cellucom, the only retailer with a pan-GCC presence, has registered an impressive increase in sales over the years. In Oman alone Cellucom has doubled its revenue.
Source- http://archive.gulfnews.com
