Micromax topples Apple in Indian tablet market

Micromax has overtaken Apple and reached the second position in the tablet market in India in the second quarter with 14% market-share, data released by the International Data Corporation (IDC) said Monday.

"Strong performance in Q2 2014 allowed Micromax to tip Apple to the second spot," an IDC statement here said.

Samsung with 19% market-share occupied the top position in the Indian tablet market. It was followed by Micromax (14%) and Apple (9%), the data showed.

According to IDC, the Indian tablet market has indicated early signs of recovery in the second quarter (April-June) of 2014 after taking a sharp hit in the past couple of quarters. Tablet shipments in India stood at 0.86 million (mn) units in Q2 2014, which is a quarter-on-quarter growth of 9 percent over first quarter (January-March) 2014.

"This recovery was fuelled by multiple factors. Business sentiments have shown improvement post elections and near term prospects are anticipated to remain better too. Further, traditional PC OEMs have started making big inroads in the tablet market and most of this success is led by leveraging their vast expanded reach through multiple distribution points," Karan Thakkar, senior market analyst, IDC India said.

Android continued to be the most preferred operating system (OS). With 89.6% market share, Android is expected to sail above the 80% mark over the next few years. Windows OS is gaining ground too, it said.

"Improved discretionary spends by end-users and festive buying is expected to drive growth in the tablet market in the coming quarters. IDC anticipates this to be well supported by the optimism witnessed around enterprise IT spending in the recent past," Kiran Kumar, research manager, client devices, IDC India said.