The Indian Mobile phone market grew 12% in units shipped, over the previous quarter, to clock 47.07 million units. Year-on-year too, there was a shipment growth of 13.8%, according to the International Data Corporation's (IDC) Q3 2011 Mobile Phone Tracker release.

"Notwithstanding a sharp decline in the mobile service subscription adds during July-Sept 2011, the mobile phone shipments witnessed a spurt, as vendors built channel inventories ahead of a long festival season. Dual-SIM handset shipments were notable with a sequential growth of 25.2% over the previous quarter". Deepak Kumar, Research Director at IDC, India said.

Interestingly, the quarter gave both the Top 2 players something to cheer about. While Nokia grew its share of overall mobile phone shipments during July-Sept by 6.8% over the previous quarter, Samsung succeeded in increasing its smartphone shipment share by 5% over the same period.

For the quarter of July-Sept 2011, Nokia had 31.8% of the mobile phones shipment share, followed by Samsung at 17.5%. In the smartphone segment, Nokia still led with a shipment share of 35.3%, but Samsung came closer at 26%.

"The slowdown of Nokia's smartphones shipment is in line with the expectations, that it would be prepping to transition some of its market share from Symbian to Windows," Deepak added.

"Overall, smartphones shipment for the India market showed an impressive growth of 21.4% over the previous quarter and 51.5% year-on-year. This helped the segment grow its contribution to the mobile phone shipment to 6.5% in Q3 from 5.6% in Q2," G. Rajeev, Lead Analyst, Mobile Phones, noted.

"From an operating system (OS) perspective, Android overtook Symbian to emerge as the top platform in India for the first time, with a share of 42.4% of the smartphone market," Rajeev added.

The platform (Android) saw a growth of 90% over the previous quarter. The Apple iOS consolidated further, with a 3.09% share of the smartphone market, compared to a share of 2.6% in Q2 2011.

Several of the Indian and Chinese brands registered varying declines in shipments. Spice and MAXX were notable exceptions and saw shipment growths of 34.1% and 10.5%, respectively, over the previous quarter of April-June 2011.