I’ll just show some graphs that clearly illustrate the differences between the smartphone markets in China and India, and tell us that Apple still needs to do a lot of basic groundwork in India before it can expect iPhone sales to boom there.
The data is taken from StatCounter, and I have used mobile operating system (excluding tablets) web usage share statistics going back to June 2010.
China
India
- Web usage from iPhone in China was already above 10% in Jan. 2011. This is presumably mostly due to gray market phones or the second-hand market since Apple wasn’t selling nearly that much iPhones in China back then.
- This suggests that the Chinese market was already primed for a big jump in iPhone purchases, far before the iPhone became available on their largest carrier, China Mobile (2014).
- In the Indian market however, there is absolutely no priming of iPhone demand. Web usage from iPhone is very small.
It is clear that for iPhone to succeed in India in the mid-term, Apple has to be pretty aggressive. The situation is nowhere like how the Chinese market was.
Naofumi Kagami 