Category A & B telecom circles remain major stronghold of top 5 smartphone brands: CMR

BANGALORE, INDIA: A new Mobilytiks report by CMR-MXpresso found that 93% of the sales of the top five smartphone brands in Q1, CY 2016  took place in Category A and B telecom circles mainly. The top five brands which held almost 68% combined market share in Indian smartphone market are Samsung, Micromax, Lenovo, Intex and Lava.

The Telecom Circles or Service Areas in India are broken down into 4 groups: 'metro', 'A', 'B', and 'C' circles. The 'metro' circles cover densely populated large Indian cities, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai. The 'A', 'B', and 'C' circles cover various geographic territories of varying population sizes. 'A' circles are the largest in terms of population coverage. 'C' circles contain the smallest population.

Category 'A' and 'B' constitute 13 of the 23 telecom circles in the country, representing 73% of the telecom subscribers base. These include Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh (East & West), among others.

While for Samsung and Lenovo, Category A circles resulted in maximum sales, it was Category B circles for the rest three brands in the top five.

Although, Samsung witnessed balanced sales from these two categories of telecom circles, Lenovo’s sales from Category 'A' circles were almost double compared to Category 'B' circles. Lenovo can give a very tough competition to the market leader Samsung, if it strengthens its hold in the telecom markets of Punjab, Haryana, UP (East & West), Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala.

Moving ahead, Category 'C' that includes Bihar, Odhisa, Himachal Pradesh, Assam, North Eastern States and Jammu & Kashmir, which are also the markets for new entry level affordable smartphones, could see some subscriber additions. Beyond this, there is also some scope in the circles within Category 'B'.

While 'metro's and Category 'A' circles are not adding any new subscribers due to the fact that contribution is still high from Category 'A' circles, which also indicates the replacements / up-gradations taking place within the subscriber base.

However, to give impetus to the smartphone market in 'metro's, there is a need to launch specific campaigns driving consumers in these markets towards premium smartphones, which is also witnessing growth otherwise. Perhaps, these are the markets where Apple should be focusing for now to further grow its business in India in 2016.

Thomas George, SVP and Head CMR said, “Today, there is a strong need for faster action oriented insight for the marketer. With Mobilytiks Program, it is our foray into big world of analytics providing data driven action oriented insights catering to the entire telecom ecosystem stakeholders. This is going to change the way insights are served to our customers, providing deeper level analysis, unique insights with largest possible sample base and coverage.”

Mobilytiks is the first prescriptive analytics based insights program pioneered by CMR and MXpresso serving the next levels of decision making for the industry.  The program gives detailed micro-level analysis of the telecom devices and services that is becoming the fundamental block of the connected society and world.

Dhiraj Gupta, Co-Founder MXpresso said, “We have the vision to provide cutting edge data analytics to organizations which helps them in improving their understanding of the market. Mobilytiks is a step in the same direction to allow brands to get deeper insights into their markets and fine tune their strategy in the most effective way.”