How India Beats US To Become the Second-biggest 5G Handset Market To bring down cost on 5G is tough, because every company is typically trying to drive high-end technology

With the increased availability of 5G handsets in the budget segment, the emerging markets have witnessed high growth in this area. According to the latest research from Counterpoint's Market Monitor service, India became the second-biggest 5G handset market during the first half of 2024, overtaking the US, the question is: How? "Good to see activities from players such as Qualcomm with the low-cost 5G solution Snapdragon 4s Gen 2, targeting emerging markets such as India, Africa and other prepaid markets. There is a growing dichotomy in the smartphone segment, with premium opportunity burgeoning with Gen AI, foldables smartphones but the sub-$150 5G opportunity should be equally rewarding for every player in the ecosystem," said Neil Shah, partner & co-founder, Counterpoint Research in his LinkedIn post.

The strong shipments from Xiaomi, vivo, Samsung and other brands in the budget segment were the main reason for this trend.

In a recent interaction with Entrepreneur India, Deepu John, senior director, product management, Qualcomm shed insights into the challenges that Qualcomm faced during the making of low cost 5G solutions for smartphones: The Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 will bring down 5G handset costs to $99.

To bring down cost on 5G is tough, because every company is typically trying to drive high-end technology. "We too right want to push the frontier of technology. However, how do you push the exact opposite direction on the chips? We realized it's not enough to just focus on the chips; it's about a phone and we don't control many aspects of it. In order to bring down the cost, we had to think differently than we typically would. And we realized, as part of our broader vision of enabling transformation, if we leave untapped pools without the benefit of 5G, customers won't be benefiting. We came to the conclusion that incremental changes wouldn't work in order to create disruption. For example, on the modem side, which is at the heart of a lot of what Qualcomm does, we had to fundamentally design a new one. There was no way to take an existing modem that we had and reduce it a little bit. That wouldn't work. So, a lot of those kinds of things had to be really thought through. And usually in this context, one of the other big challenges is you do not want to really reduce the features," he explained.

"We excel at engineering innovation, where we work with our team to really drive the innovative solutions. It's a brand new ground up effort because we believe it will fundamentally transform the industry. Qualcomm-powered affordable handsets should be expected closer to the end of the year," he added.

From a futuristic perspective, if 6G comes in place, would you also look forward to bringing something like this in an affordable range? "Yeah, so we traditionally do this. We did this in 3G, we did this in 4G, we are doing this in 5G. Initially, it always comes from the top because as technology evolves, we are able to optimize it further and bring it down. So 6G will also likely follow the exact same trajectory and at some point, once it gets to a threshold."

As the democratization of 5G handsets increases with increasing 5G penetration in lower price segments as well as increasing expansion of 5G networks, this trend will further grow. The global 5G handset shipments grew 20 percent year-on-year (YoY) in the first half of 2024. From April-June, MediaTek led India's smartphone chipset market with a 54 per cent share. Qualcomm led the premium segment with a 33 per cent share. The INR 20,000-INR 30,000 (~$240-$360) and >INR 45,000 (>~$540) price bands saw the fastest growth at 25 per cent and 24 per cent YoY respectively.