India to have 160 million smartphone users by 2017: ASSOCHAM

Affordability, large subscribers' base pushing smart phones sales: study

With in-built camera and other internet-enabled features, sales of smart phones in India are set to shoot up to 160 million in FY' 17 from 100 million in FY' 16 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, an ASSOCHAM study has pointed out.

Consequent to the smart phones serving the needs of amateur photographers and enthusiasts, the rise of smart phones 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.    

Smartphone sales almost more than doubled from 44 million units in 2013 to 100 million units in 2016. The volume of smartphone sales is expected to touch 160 million units by 2017, reveals the ASSOCHAM latest study.

Affordable smartphones includes handsets in the price of Rs 4000-10,000. This segment accounts for 78 per cent 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the product developers have to think ahead of times; or else the top selling products of the present times can become outdated, without the manufacturers and those dominating the market today realising it, " ASSOCHAM Secretary Mr D S Rawat said.

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 Smart Phones 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, adds the ASSOCHAM paper.

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. Most of the youth in the country share photographs online and upload photographs which has become a new trend in the metros thus giving rise to the need for smart phones, said Mr. Rawat.