For the first time ever, 4G smartphones overtake 3G smartphones

Indians are warming up to 4G smartphones more than ever before, resulting in a surge in the shipment of such devices that has outpaced its 3G counterparts for the first time, a report by market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) shows.

"With 25.9% month-on-month growth, 4G-based smartphones accounted for more than half of smartphones shipped in October. This gain is mainly at the expense of 3G enabled handsets as vendors are replacing their existing models with 4G-based smartphones while making consumers future proof," Kiran Kumar, research manager, client devices, IDC India, said.

According to IDC's India monthly smartphone tracker, 9.3 million smartphones were shipped in India in the month of October 2015, coming off from healthy September numbers of over 10 million unit shipments.

The research firm said the marginal decline could be attributed to incremental supplies witnessed during the concluding weeks of September as the channels prepared for October's festive demand and online mega sales from major e-commerce players.

"Owing to attractive discounts and offers during online mega sales, online shipments of smartphones grew 12.15 in October over the previous month. This boosted the online share further from 33.5% in September 2015 to 41.2% in October 2015, primarily driven by Samsung and Lenovo," Karthik J, senior market analyst, client devices, IDC India, said.

Online mega sales not only encouraged vendors to increase shipments online, but also facilitated the launch of many new models to accommodate the huge end-user demand during October, he added.

Samsung's On5 and On7, Lenovo's Vibe P1, Oneplus 2, Apple's iphone 6s are few of the many new models that incrementally contributed to the online volume in October 2015, the report shows.

IDC also said shipments of the top three Chinese vendors namely Lenovo Group, Xiaomi and Vivo together grew at a healthy 18% month-over-month in October.

"Lenovo Group is one of the key driver for this growth with considerable volume of shipments coming from their new line up of smartphones like A1000, Vibe P1, A6010, etc. On the other hand, in October, more than half of Xiaomi's smartphones shipped in India were locally manufactured and with Redmi Note Prime too joining local production line up, this share is only expected to go up," Kumar explained.

The research firm also anticipates that the traction of 4G-based smartphones would only grow further as Reliance Jio's 4G based-phones are expected to hit the market by the end of 2015.