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The first quarter of 2008 observed some unexpected changes in the hierarchy of Indian Mobile phone vendors. Nokia still enjoys leading the number one spot by a huge margin followed by Sony Ericsson. But the real distinction has been a change in the position for the third slot. Korean vendor Samsung has replaced Motorola to emerge as the third largest player in the Indian market.

According to a recent report published by the ORG data, Samsung shines out as the only leading telecom player to have hiked its market share in the Indian market during January-March period. It currently enjoys 7 percent market share as compared to 5.7 percent in the beginning of the quarter1. Motorola India lost market share from 6.7 percent to 5.9 percent, but Sony Ericsson remained at the same level of 8.1 percent. Even the market leader Nokia lost market share in India from 72.3 percent to 69.5 percent in the period January and March.

“In January-March, we registered a good growth in our mobile phone business based on our channel expansion programme, new product launches like the Guru 100, SGH-G800, Samsung i450 to name a few,” said Sunil Dutt, country head, Samsung Telecommunications India.

Samsung, which has become the world’s second largest handset maker, intends to double its Indian market share by end-2008 from the present level and also plans to launch a series of new products at entry-level and premium segment to further consolidate its Indian share.

On the other hand, Motorola announced that its global handset shipment had seen a fall from 40.9 million phones in Q4 of 2007 to some 27.4 million handsets in Q1 of 2008.