Anew study on the mobile handset market has some bad news for home-grown handset makers.

If the data put together by CyberMedia groups flagship journal for the telecom industry Voice & Data i s anything to go by, barring Karbonn and Lava, none of the Indian handset players has been able to face up to the challenge thrown at them by global handset makers in 2011-12. Their mainstay feature phones saw a negative growth while the entry level smartphones of various companies saw a marginal rise.

Indian mobile phone brands that had hoped to make a mark by sourcing Chinese handsets and selling them only on the price pla nk were in for a big surprise. These players will have to quickly rethink their product, marketing and service strategy afresh to put their house in order, said Ibrahim Ahmad, group editor, Voice & Data.

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Overall, the Indian mobile handset market saw a drop of 5 per cent in revenues in 2011-12. The revenues dropped to Rs 31,215 crore from Rs 33,031 crore a year back. The survey by Voice & Data attributes this drop to de-growth in the feature phones sales as well as lower average selling values. As consumers look for applications beyond voice and SMS th e market will see fight for high end feature phones and smart phones intensify further. Consumers can also look forward to steeper price drops and more features in the same price. according to Ahmad.

The annual study V&D 100 surveyed over 30 mobile handset firms - both multi-national and Indian selling feature phones, multimedia phones, enterprise phones and smartphones in India.

The disappearing act done by the homegrown handset makers was a big surprise of the year. Homegrown handset company Micromax with revenues of Rs 1,978 crore ranked No. 3 among Voice & Data100 Top10 mobile handset brands recording a 13 per cent negative growth. Micromax had a market share of 6.3 per cent.

The other Indian player to post revenues of over Rs 1,000 crore was Karbonn. The company grew its revenues 32 per cent to emerge as the No. 5 player with a market share of 4.3 per cent.

Nokia remained the No.1 player 2011-12 with revenue of Rs 11,925 crore, despite an 8 per cent drop over the Rs 12,929 crore revenue posted in 2011. The Finnish company lost market share in smartphones and multi-media segment to Samsung, HTC and Apple, among others. Korean company Samsung grew its revenues 38 per cent to Rs 7,891 crore and was at the No. 2 spot with a market share of 25.3 per cent.

TOP 10 INDIA MOBILE HANDSET VENDORS: VOICE & DATA 100 SURVEY 2012
Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Brand name Nokia Samsung Micromax Blackberry Karbonn HTC Spice LG Huawei GFive Total 2011-12 2010-11 Change 11925 7891 1978 1460 1327 923 790 780 750 670 12929 5720 2289 1950 1004 450 920 1834 626 1326 -8 38 -14 -25 32 105 -14 -57 20 -49 -5 Mkt Share (%age) 38.2 25.3 6.3 4.7 4.3 3.0 2.5 2.5 2.4 2.1 100.0

31,215.00 33,031.00

Source: Cybermedia's Voice&Data Annual survey of the industry 2012 Revenue in Rs crore

Among the other global companies in the V&D100 Top 10 study, Canadian BlackBerry maker Research In Motion dropped the most, 25 per cent, to post revenues of Rs 1,460 crore. At No 4 Blackberry had a market share of 4.7 per cent on the back of entry level smart phones last year.

Taiwanese handset maker HTC saw maximum growth 105 per cent, among all the brands surveyed by Voice&Data. HTC's revenue more than doubled to Rs 923 crore, from Rs 450 crore, to inch a 3 per cent market share. The other key players in the Top 10 list include spice Telecom (Rs 790 crore), LG (Rs 780 crore), Huawei (Rs 760 crore) and GFive (Rs 670 crore).

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