India beats US to become world’s second largest smartphone market

India has surpassed the US to become the world's second largest smartphone market, crossing 220 million in active unique smartphone users in 2015, a year when Samsung maintained its leadership position and Apple made big strides.

"This speaks volumes for the scale India market provides for any player in the mobile connected ecosystem. India still has a long way to go as the smartphone penetration of the total potential population is still below 30%," Tarun Pathak, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in a statement.

The smartphone shipments in India also grew a healthy 15% annually in the October-December quarter, and rose 23% on year to cross 100 million units milestone, the research firm said.

Apple rode the demand for smartphones and specifically for its iPhones, crossing 2 million units for the first time in a calendar year led by a strong fourth quarter, Counterpoint said.

On revenue market share basis, Apple was the third largest brand during the year with 11%, improving on its 2014 revenue share of 7%, even though it had only 2% smartphone volume share. However, the brand continues to trail Samsung and Micromax in 2015, two smartphone makers which held on to their No 1 and No 2 positions by volume market shares in 2015.

The overall mobile handset market in India, however, has contracted on a yearly basis, as transition from feature phones to smartphones gathers momentum in the country. Counterpoint Research data also suggests that the overall shipment has gone done around 3% to reach 243 million in the calendar year 2015, from 250 million in 2014.

Another report by CMR suggests that the market has gone down 9.1% on-year with 235.6 million units sold in the year. It added that smartphones, which constituted 39.8% of the total sales, grew at 18% while feature phones registered a sharp decline of 27.1% in annual shipments.

"We are witnessing a transition period for the industry from mass to niche, feature phones to smartphones, 2G and 3G to 4G, 'offline only' to hybrid, and 'imports only' to domestic manufacturing with imports," Faisal Kawoosa, lead telecoms analyst, CMR, said in a statement, adding that the change lead to contraction of the market by volume which was seen towards end of calendar year 2015.

"Once this transition is over and vendors adopt the right mix of sourcing and marketing, and develop competencies to address the emerging or niche segments rather than the mass market, we should see the market rebound," Kawoosa added.