Qualcomm India’s Revenue Jumped 23 Percent In FY18

Qualcomm India’s revenue jumped 23 percent in FY18 driven by a demand surge for phones in the world’s second-most populous nation where the telecom industry is transiting rapidly to 4G data technology after the entry of Reliance Jio. The San Diego based company powered more than half the total smartphones sold in India and posted sales of Rs 5,426 crore locking in a net profit of Rs 518 crore in FY18, financials sourced from research platform Tofler showed.

While the company’s growth slowed down from a year ago when it grew 39 percent, it has nearly doubled sales and profit over the past three years. “There are two aspects that have stood out for India; one, this is a growing market for
smartphones and two, the telecom carriers have also rapidly adopted 4G, which has transitioned this market totally from 3G to 4G and now is moving the 2G to 4G,” said Rajen Vagadia, country manager of Qualcomm India. This transition has been fuelled by solutions that Qualcomm provided, including the explosive growth of the Jio 4G feature phone at one end of the spectrum while our partners like Xiaomi have brought premium tier Snapdragon 845 at affordable prices,” Vagadia said.

Reliance Jio, which started services in India in September 2016, helped spur data consumption in the country with its 4G-only network that forced rivals Airtel and Vodafone to slash tariffs. Overall, India mobile phone shipment
crossed 300 million units for the first time ever with smartphones capturing almost 44 percent of the total volumes in CY 2017. Qualcomm said it has evolved over the last few years supporting end-to-end product engineering, contributing to technology innovation in areas such as 4G, IoT and now 5G.

However, its Indian revenue doesn’t account the sale of all its products in India since a bulk of its transactions are with global suppliers in the US and China, which in turn market them in the country. “Considering that most of the
smartphones featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset are in the mid and high tier segment, the sales value for the company easily runs in billions of dollars in India. Qualcomm India can further grow its revenues given the OEMs and ODMs in India start sourcing products directly with the advancing manufacturing and designing ecosystem in India,” said Shobit Srivastava, research analyst, Mobile devices and Ecosystem, Counterpoint Research.

Qualcomm has been working closely with the carriers in India helping bring features such as voice calls over a 4G LTE network and voice over wifi for Indian consumers. The chipmaker said most companies were looking to launch
major global technologies concurrently in India, making the country the first or second market for such rollouts.―Gadgets Now