NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, August 10, 2015

China may be the world’s biggest mobile market, but all eyes in the tech industry are now turning toward India, with its rapidly growing appetite for smartphones.

In just the last couple of weeks and months, a string of announcements and stories have cemented the notion that India has now become a primary focus for many of the biggest names in mobile. The reason for that is simple: By 2017, India is poised to pass the U.S. to become the world’s second largest smartphone market.

“China has been the engine of global smartphone growth in recent years, but China is now maturing and slowing,” wrote Linda Sui, director at Strategy Analytics, in a forecast issued earlier this year. “India is fast becoming the next major growth wave. We forecast 118 million smartphones will be sold in India in 2015, increasing strongly to 174 million in 2017.”

With China’s economy showing some signs of sputtering, and adoption of smartphones in India accelerating, the pace of investment in that country’s mobile market has picked up significantly.

Let’s start with today and work backwards.

In a ceremony today in India, Xiaomi, the red-hot Chinese manufacturer of smartphones, said it would now begin manufacturing the phones it sells in India within the country. Those phones will be built in partnership with Foxconn, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners, which had announced two days earlier a pact to spend $5 billion building new manufacturing facilities in India.