Smartphones sales likely to surge 14% in 2020

The sale of smartphones id expected to up-well 14 per cent in the year 2020, according to an analyst firm TechArc. India is the largest market for mobile phones after China. The sale of smartphones in India is expected to grow despite of the slowdown in consumer goods. Projection for the preceding year was 12 per cent which constitutes to 145 million units. The reason behind such a projection for the year 2020 is because the existing users wish to upgrade their handsets which may constitute to 165 million units of mobile phones this year. This shows a growth of 13.8 per cent each year.

Vendors who ship mobile phones have been shipping higher amounts of handsets. This caused shops to have surplus inventory of handsets than what they could sell. Faisal Kawoosa, a leading analyst at TechArc, said that players like Realme handsets shipped in millions more than their retail could take during the month of September; this was the time of major festivals in India like Onam. Realme 3 pro which is a variant of the handset Realme was quickly sold out on all e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon. The enthusiasm of the vendors who shipped these handsets has led to surplus inventory which is estimated to be 7-10 million units of handsets at the end of 2019.

One drawback of top smartphone players in the market in India are the inability to make feature phone users to switch to smartphones which account almost 39 per cent of total mobile phone users (30 per cent feature phone users and 9 per cent smart feature phone users). Top brands like Xiaomi, Samsung, Vivo, Oppo and Realme are not focusing on the entry-level segment of handsets; therefore, cost of acquiring a smartphone remains at least 60 per cent higher than a feature phone. The sale of second-hand handsets has risen significantly over the years and is expected to rise to 23 per cent in 2020. The sale of smart feature phones (Jio phones) is expected to drop 34 per cent in 2020.

The constant pressure by players in smartphone industry for the past years has made customers to upgrade their smartphones which was of the range Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000 price segments to a higher range. This has further expected to grow and likely to top 14 per cent projection in the current year.