ZTE becomes India’s leading Data Card vendor with 30.2% marketshare in Q2, 2013

ZTE, the Chinese company known for its communication infrastructure solutions and even smartphone products, is now the leading Data Card vendor in India, with a user base of 63.04% of the total Data Card users. The CyberMedia Research team had released these statistics for the Indian market in their website sometime back, where they actually noted a decline in the Data Card market from the previous year but compared to the last quarter, Q2 has seen a 66.7% growth and about 30.2% of all the new shipments are ZTE cards, according to the data.

The Data Card market is considered a niche segment, and the decline during the last year is being attributed to the dwindling CDMA users but the GSM growth has spurted recently, negating the fall, according to CMR. It is also presumed that ZTE took complete advantage of the CDMA down turn, but introducing new 3G GSM cards. Overall, there are 1.8 million units estimated to have shipped in the this year, which is lesser than the 2.2 million the previous year.

According to the CMR analysts -

The numbers clearly reveal that India is going the LTE way. Even with the issues faced by subscribers using 3G networks, the adoption has not been adversely affected. Recent developments in 3G and LTE markets indicate a healthy potential for operators.  Moreover, uptake of 3G-enabled Tablets is also pushing up the consumption of GSM data cards,

With increasing number of 3G GSM data cards being shipped, the market is moving towards LTE, which also has already seen some limited introduction in certain parts of a few cities. However, the mobile industry is still seen as the harbinger of Internet data on-the-go for millions and millions of users. Will LTE data cards possibly change the landscape if the availability is before Smartphones? Possibly, but it’s still hard to say whether there will be more of these.

That said, ZTE also launched really cheap open market data cards recently under the Swift brand ranging from Rs. 1,799 to Rs. 2,299. The models are -

• Swift (7.2Mbps with Voice Call)
• Swift Plus (14.4Mbps)
• Swift WPlus (14.4Mbps with Wifi)

These are not tied to any network and lets you use 3G SIMs the way you want, with the operators you prefer. Are you using any one of these? If so, how useful do you think they are? Let us know in the comments section below!