In less than a year of re-entering the Indian market, Motorola has become a hurdle for the biggest vendors in India. The Lenovo-owned company become the fourth-largest smartphone seller in the country, according to Canalys’s report on the smartphone market in India.
Motorola overtook Nokia, which is now Microsoft Mobile, to take fourth place in a market that’s fast becoming increasingly long-tail market. The former Google company shipped 955,650 smartphones, compared to Nokia’s 633,720 units. So it had a comfortable lead as far shipment numbers are concerned. And it’s only in the past few months that the Moto G and Moto E have remained in stock, while earlier they would sell out as soon as they were available on Flipkart, so we can presume that Motorola did manage to sell a lot of its shipped inventory.
What’s fascinating is that Nokia has fallen quite a bit considering it launched several new handsets in India, including the Windows Phone 8.1-running Nokia Lumia 630. The now Microsoft-owned company sold 583,160 smartphones in the last quarter compared to Motorola’s 379,310 units. “Motorola continues to see tremendous momentum in India. We’re delighted that our phones are receiving an overwhelmingly positive response from Indian consumers,” the company’s India head Amit Boni was quoted as saying by ET.
Motorola trailed world smartphone leader Samsung, while Indian players Micromax and Karbonn occupied second and third spot. Together the top-three shipped over 8.2 million devices as the Indian smartphone market grew by nine percent quarter-over-quarter.
Motorola is yet to announce refreshes for its Moto X and Moto G phones, but they will be coming this year, along with the Moto 360 smartwatch, which will also be launched in India, according to the company.
