India’s IT Hardware Industry Increased 24% In Fy 2015

MAIT along with the Market research IMRB firm has come out with its an annual ITOPS performance report of ICT industry for the FY 2014-15, which has registered overall a healthy growth of 24% over 2014 in terms of revenue. The achieved growth for this year has been much higher than the expected growth by the MAIT. However for the next year, MAIT looks not so promising to maintain this growth and made a overall projection 15% growth for ICT industry for the year 2015-16.

The biggest driver of this growth has been Phablets, which has registered a humongous growth of 527% over last year to do 50.8 mn sales and is expected to grow by around 65% in the next fiscal years.

Amar Babu, president, MAIT said, “We are very happy with the 24% overall growth IT hardware market has registered. Comparing to other industries, the hardware industry is still holding a positive and robust growth Y-o-Y. I think its an excellent forecast of 15%, which is a 2X of GDP. Smartphones, phablets and servers have been a big and positive surprise for the IT hardware market and we see the same trend continues to rise the market in next year.”

The report showed after six years of positive growth, desktop and notebook categories saw a big hit in the absence of major government projects like ELCOT and Uttar Pradesh free laptop distribution scheme. Nevertheless, MAIT is hoping to see revival of the notebook category as the ELCOT project will be resuming the procurement of laptops for students in the Tamil Nadu in coming months, along with digital India, the overall hardware and devices will see the good demand in the next year.”

Babu informed, “The ELCOT project is at its final stage as the tender and bidding process is over.”

As the desktop and notebook have de-grown by 10% this year, it has a direct negative impact to the peripherals market be it printers, UPS, keyboard and monitors.

According to the findings, the overall size of Indian ICT hardware market stands at $15.87 bn, showing a growth of 23.98% overall the previous years. This segment includes PCs, desktop, phablets (screen size 5 inch and more) Tablets( screen size greater than or equal to 7 inch) smartphones, servers and peripherals. However, the total PC sales(desktop and notebooks) stood at 10.62 mn units, registering negative growth of 10% over the last fiscal.

Surprisingly, the server market has seen a strong growth this year, sales have registered a growth of 30% over the last FY and it stood at 182,727 units in the current year. But this trend will be changing as the server market is expected to de-grow by another 10% in FY 2015-16 due to the growing cloud based services and SMBs seeking more dependent on cloud services.

Biswapriya Bhattacharjee, VP, BIRD, IMRB International said, “Rural markets continued to show strong uptake of phablets and smartphones due to the low cost devices and improvement in the broadband. Even, the replacement market has seen phablets growing strong as the second internet device.”