Chinese telecom equipment vendor ZTE is leading the Indian data card market in the second quarter of 2013, ahead of Huawei and Micromax.
ZTE’s share in the data card market in Q2 (April-May-June) of 2013 was 30.2 percent against Huawei’s 29.9 percent and Micromax’s 14.2 percent, according to CMR’s India Data Cards Market Review.
The report said data card shipments declined 16.8 percent to 1.83 million data cards.
CDMA data cards shipments declined 62.3 percent in Q2 2013 comparing with Q2 2012.
GSM data card shipments rose 87.8 percent.
In GSM, Huawei is the leader with 24.9 percent data card market share. Micromax is in the second position with 20.7 percent against ZTE’s 18.9 percent.
In CDMA data card market, ZTE has 54 percent market share against Huawei’s 40.7 percent share, CMR said on Friday.
Faisal Kawoosa, lead analyst, CMR Telecoms Practice, said that there has been a significant decline in overall data card shipments on a yearly basis, mainly because of declining shipments of CDMA data cards.
GSM data cards rose due to increasing shipments of HSDPA 14.4, HSDPA+ 21.6 and LTE 100 data cards. Uptake of 3G-enabled tablets is also pushing up the consumption of GSM data cards.
ZTE, Huawei and Micromax contributed 74 percent to the total data card shipments in Q2 2013.
In GSM technology, Huawei, Micromax and ZTE together made up nearly 65 percent of shipments in Q2 2013, while in CDMA technology ZTE and Huawei together contributed 95 percent of shipments during the same period.
Demand to stay connected among business executives, students and consumers has opened up new growth avenues for the India data cards market.
The market has seen several bundling deals with mobile service providers, laptop PC OEMs and tablet vendors. Players like Alcatel, iBall and Lava also witnessed an upward trend in their data card shipment numbers.
