Reliance JioFi Continues to Dominate Data Card Market With 91 Percent Share: CMR

Reliance Retail's JioFi continued to dominate data card segment with a market share of 91 percent - leaving Huawei far behind at three percent - during the second quarter of calendar year 2017.

The huge lead was attributed to the launch of consecutive free data services by Reliance Jio followed by availability of Mi-Fi data cards at different prices, according to a report by CyberMedia Research (CMR) released on Thursday.

MiFis driven by Jio have gained acceptance in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns, which could result in erosion of potential broadband base for operators like BSNL.

"Reliance Jio's Mi-Fi devices (JioFi) have also impacted home router market. Our initial statistics from the channels suggest a decline of 60-70 percent sales in major cities," said Narinder Kumar, Analyst, Industry Intelligence Practice, CMR, in a statement.

The other players were confined to limited market share, like ZTE (three percent) and Alcatel (two percent).

The report said that the overall shipment of data cards grew to 4 million in Q2 - an increase of 16 percent over the 3.4 million units in Q1 and 614 percent Year-on-year (YoY).

LTE/ 4G data card shipments accounted for 17 percent sequential growth in Q2 owing to MiFi devices, becoming the most favoured technology.

Data card with data-rate of 150 Mbps accounted for 97 percent of the total shipments with around 92 percent of them built on Qualcomm chipsets, the report added.