India is currently the second largest smartphone market in the world, only China is currently ahead of India in this regard. Many smartphone manufacturers started selling their devices in India over the last couple of years, and a number of them started manufacturing them in that Asian country as well. India has actually kicked off ‘Make in India’ initiative a while back in order to lure manufacturers to make their devices in the country. As par of ‘Make in India’ project, India provides various incentives to OEMs who are willing to make phones in the country.
That being said, we Cisco Mobile Visual Networking Index released some interesting numbers recently. According to the report, there will be 990 million mobile users in India by 2020, which is a staggering number. This means that around 71% of India’s population will be using mobile devices, and for comparison’s sake, 798.4 people have been using mobile devices last year. So, Cisco basically expects that an additional 200 million people (approximately) will start using mobile devices in the next four years. The report also states that data traffic will grow 12-fold and reach 1.7 exabytes per month by 2020, all thanks to various data tariffs which are becoming more affordable by the day. Now, in order to compare these numbers, let’s just say that 148.9 petabytes have been transferred last year (per month). “With the ever-increasing billions of people and things that are being connected, mobility is the predominant medium that’s enabling today’s global digitisation transformation,” said Cisco’s Vice President of Service Provider Marketing, Doug Webster.
Mr. Webster has also added that further mobile innovation in cellular will be needed to address various scale requirements, user demands and security concerns. He was referring to innovations such as 5G and Wi-Fi technology, so it’s kind of hard to be precise when it comes to number, we’ll see how accurate were Cisco’s predictions in four years. Now, it seems like India will grow immensely in the next couple of years as far as mobile communications are concerned. It will certainly going to be interesting to see if India can catch up to China at some point, and become the world’s largest mobile market. China still has a huge lead, but their growth is significantly less than India’s, so it is possible.