India has nearly as many smartphone users as the US has people, and it is about to get many millions more.
The South Asian nation is already one of the world's hottest mobile markets, with everyone from Samsung and Apple to China's Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi fighting with Indian brands such as Micromax for a piece of the action. And it's just getting started. Experts say India's tally of 300 million smartphone users could grow by more than 50% in the next few years.
There are about 650 million mobile phone users in India, and just over 300 million of them have a smartphone, according to technology consultancy Counterpoint Research. That means India is already a bigger smartphone market than the U.S. and second only to China.
It also means there are about1 billion Indians who do not yet have a smartphone - a huge market opportunity.
"India is in a very sweet spot in terms of smartphone growth," said Shobhit Srivastava, an analyst at Counterpoint Research. "You have over 300 million people sitting on a 2G device that will eventually move forward to a smartphone... this is the potential that India holds."
Two out of three Indian mobile users - or roughly 433 million people - are planning to upgrade their phones in the next year, according to a recent Counterpoint survey. More than 66% of India's 1.3 billion people still don't have access to the internet. The hundreds of millions set to come online over the next decade will likely do so through mobile devices.
"Mobile has already become the the primary device from which users access the internet," said Srivastava.
Until recently, connecting via mobile had been prohibitively expensive for most Indians but that is beginning to change thanks to a collapse in the price of data.
India's wealthiest man, Mukesh Ambani, sparked a price war a year ago by offering new users six months free access to his Reliance Jio 4G network. The result: India now has some of the cheapest mobile data in the world. (BBC)
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