India is the fastest growing smartphone market in the world. The country has seen a rise in migration to smartphones from basic feature phones, according to the State of the Android Mobile Web report for India by Opera Software.
The report said that India has the largest Opera Mini user base in the world that has increased by 25% over the past year, while its smartphone user base surged by 120%. Meanwhile, the Android smartphones user base has increased by an impressive 160%, said the report.
“Opera Mini’s basic phone users are upgrading to Android smartphones at a pace we haven’t experienced before. It is likely that this growth is fueled by aggressively priced smartphones by Indian OEMs. Currently, we have partnerships with 16 Indian OEMs who have preinstalled Opera Mini on over 350 models of Android devices. Opera Mini’s unique data compression technology, which lets users browse faster, make it a great fit for Indian handsets”
said Sunil Kamath, Vice President for South Asia at Opera Software.
Opera report further states that 77% of its users in India have a smartphone priced below Rs 10,000. Micromax is the leading smartphone maker with 30% of users followed by Samsung at 25%. However, Samsung takes the number one spot in terms of the top 10 positions in Android handsets used by Opera Mini users and also consume 56% of data on the top 100 Android devices. In comparison, Micromax users consume 21% data. Moving on, 47% of users are accessing Opera Mini on their smartphones and not the basic Java phones.
Giving insights about user activities on the Opera browser, the report reveals that video consumption is on a rise. Unique user visits to video sites increased by 205% since last year with YouTube leading this category, followed by Dailymotion and Metacafe. The number of Opera Mini users visiting these sites grew by 175%, 450% and 205% respectively in that timeframe.
74% of Indian mobile users on the web are accessing Facebook as seven out of ten pages are of the social network on the Opera Mini browser. Besides social network e-commerce portal have also witnessed a growth of over 240% in Opera Mini users over the last year. Within this category, shopping portals experienced a massive 356% growth in user visits. The most accessed site is Flipkart, followed by Amazon and Snapdeal. Online classifieds websites are also becoming more popular among users. The category jumped 150%, with Quikr in the lead, followed by OLX and Sulekha.
The report is based on aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers.