Samsung Pushes Motorola into 3rd Place in India

Samsung has overtaken Motorola in India's handset market, according to figures from a local market research firm. The latest ORG figures reports that Samsung's market share rose from 5.7% in January to 7% in March of this year - over taking Motorola which dropped from 6.7% to 5.9%.

Sony Ericsson retained second place with a market share of 8.1 percent while Nokia continues to dominate the market with a huge 59.5% market share. Nokia's market share did actually drop over the three months, after it lost a couple of percentage points.

Samsung says that it is aiming to take the second place from Sony Ericsson within the next few months.

"We have gained substantially and hope to continue to do so with our new range of models and become the second largest player in the market by the end of next quarter. We have a manufacturing capacity of seven million units, which can be ramped up. We can also leverage the groupĂ's existing facility in Chennai if required," said Sunil Dutt, country head of Samsung Telecom. The company also plans to launch a range of new handsets targeting the Indian market.

Motorola has however recently said that it will refocus efforts on the Indian market, so the battle for third place could become quite dynamic over the next year or so.

Just over a year ago, analysts from Merrill Lynch visited India and reported at the time that Nokia had managed to corner a staggering 75-80% of the market thanks to an early decision to rapidly roll-out retail distribution deals as the networks themselves expanded their coverage. Of the estimated 79,000 retail outlets in India selling mobile phones, Nokia had a presence in 72,000 of them.

Since then, all the handset vendors have worked hard to build up their retail presence and the results can be seen in the slowly shrinking market share allocated to Nokia.

Posted to the site on 16th May 2008