At a time when users are benefitting from price war among smartphone brands, Indian user base is all set to touch a new high with two out of every three consumers seeking to switch to a new phone in every 10-12 months. This would make India among the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, valued at about $442.5 million by 2022. Pre-owned smartphone market is also on the rise in the wake of frequent launches of the new models of handsets and their upgrades. India’s used smartphone market is expected to reach $4 billion by 2020, according to a Delloitte India report.
While e-commerce sale trends and high discounts on smartphones act as a motivation for consumers to upgrade to new smartphones, brands like Xiaomi and Huawei are giving a tough competition to premium range smartphones, offering almost similar specs in mid-budget price segment. The re-commerce trend is breaking all barriers of selling smartphones and influencing pre-owned smartphone users to sell their smartphones without taking hassles of negotiations and prices. The online marketplaces like OLX and Quikr have become a counterpart of offline selling, which is largely unorganised. In its place re-commerce platforms like InstaCash, Cashify, Buldi, Togofogo and others are offering to sell phones on the doorstep, the Delloitte study says.
According to TechArch reports, Indian Smartphone Industry will witness 13% growth in sales in 2019 with an estimated 149 million smartphones to be sold in the year. Prateek Goel, co-founder InstaCash, said, “Frequent sales, offers, exchanges, cashbacks on e-commerce platforms give a boost to the sales on our platform. Also, common problems like frequent negotiations, delayed selling and no seller protection on the classified sites and open market have resulted in more users to sell phones instantly on platforms like ours.”
“Seeing the success in 21 cities across India, we forayed to the high potential smartphone markets of south Asia. We launched in Malaysia through a strategic partnership with CompAsia in 2018. With our soaring success in Malaysia — 11,300 mobile trade in just in three months— the company is all set for Singapore and Taiwan, Goel said.
Julius Lim, founder & CEO of CompAsia, citing a Google and Temasek report, said 3.8 million people come online for the first time in the region each month primarily through mobile. The International Data Corporation foresees that over time more devices will see sales grow as the new internet users seek to upgrade their smartphone by selling their old phones resulting in more transactions month-on-month.
