India smartphone mkt posts steep 20% decline

Chennai: Even as premium smartphones such as Apple clock all-time high India sales, the country’s overall smartphone market has reported consecutive quarters of decline in shipments.

Sluggish demand in the mass market category and longer upgrade cycles given current economic conditions pulled down the smartphone market in the latest January-March quarter. Analysts TOI spoke to estimate a sharp steepest decline in shipments in this period, which is also seasonally a slow quarter.

Global research firm Canalys on Wednesday said that the first quarter of calendar year 2023 has seen the first-ever Q1 decline at 20% year-on-year at 30.6 million units.