Pakistan's Feature Phone market - Does it still have some potential left? Part 1

From childhood, I kept hearing a saying that goes like "Mara haathi bhi sawa lakh ka hota hai - Even a dead elephant worth hundred and a quarter grand".

Not that it never made any sense to me but recently this really struck a chord while developing a feasibility for Feature phone lineup in Pakistan. For people involved in the handset industry, this category is seen as a dying breed for many years, after 2012 we all moved to more glamorous segment .i.e. Smartphones which has been showing the double-digit growth since 2012 and wondered how soon the so-called dumbphone segment will suffer the slow death due to the more illustrious sibling.

So, while working on this project, I decided to do a comparative analysis of both smartphone and feature phone volume share in Pakistan for the last four years, the result, however, wasn’t completely unexpected but left me with the sudden realization of what it means to have a dead elephant still worth million.

Although the analogy ends here, the four years comparison shed some light on how Feature phone segment was able to fend off and survived the growing onslaught of smartphone segment we have seen in last few years. Looking at this 4 year trend, the most visible aspect is how the gap between the two segment is shrinking however if we look closely at the annual growth rate then its more apparent that how feature phone category has stabilized itself in 2017 and the apparent slowing down of smartphone growth from double-digit growth starting from early days of 2010 to a mere 3% annual growth in volume in 2017 has somewhat kept Feature phone relevance in greater scheme of things. So, are we witnessing the reversal in fortunes for feature phones then? No, not at all.

More to discuss in the next part including how QMobile fiasco has actually kick-started a somewhat revival of feature phone category and why everyone who has even a remote interest in the Pakistan handset industry is eyeing to start a feature phone brand…