India is the third largest market for smartphones currently, after China and the US, and is expected to become the second biggest market by 2016.
A scramble for the large Indian market means that in 2014, 95 brands (64 Indian and 31 international) together launched 1,137 phones, according to gadgets research site 91mobiles.com. That is an average of 3.1 phones every day.
Motorola, Xiaomi, ASUS, OnePlus, Lenovo and Huawei were the most searched brands on the site, which receives 100 million searches ever year.
Acer, HP, Philips, OnePlus, vivo and AOC were some of the brands that entered the Indian market in 2014, most notably, Motorola re-entered the Indian market with its exclusive agreement with e-commerce retailer Flipkart.
The number of smartphones launched in India grew by 19 percent year-on-year, growing from 957 launches in 2013 to 1,137 phone launches in 2014.
2014 saw a surge in value-for-money devices. Mobiles priced between Rs5,000 and Rs15,000 accounted for 59% of devices launched in 2014. The average selling price of smartphones fell by 19% over the course of the year.
“A lot of phones are launched silently since they are catering to a niche in the market. The phones that we hear about that are marketed aggressively.” said Nithin Mathur, co-founder of 91mobiles.com, speaking to Huffpost India. “We maintain catalog data of every phone launched in the Indian market. We can track stuff like how many brands were launched, the cheapest 3G enabled device, data that even brands do not have.” he added.
Mathur said that around 215 phones had been launched in 2015, adding that launches pick up pace in the latter half of the year, particularly around the festive season.
The report looks at some of the key trends in the mobile landscape in 2014—The average smartphone priced above Rs 5,000 now ships with over a gigabyte of RAM, 60% of all smartphones launched in 2014 were powered by quad-core and above processors, HD resolution screens grew more pervasive, as did 13-megapixel+ sensors.
Brands adopting the online-only sales model accounted for 20% of all searches by the end of 2014.
Scroll through the slideshow below to see the findings and highlights of the report.
Contact HuffPost India