Smartphone users have stopped buying memory cards in India: here’s why

With most smartphones having up to 256GB of internal storage, people now have fewer reasons to buy microSD cards for their phones. And these changes have been reflected in a recent market survey of shipments of storage devices such as microSD cards, SD cards, which have declined over the past 12 months.

“In the first quarter, 25 percent of smartphones without an external memory card slot were shipped, indicating a shift in the market trend,” said Shipra Sinha, lead analyst at CMR.

The lack of an external card slot means you can’t expand the storage on the phones. The feature is mostly absent from phones priced above Rs 30,000. CMR’s report also mentions that more than 55 percent of phones shipped during the quarter had 128 GB or more of internal storage.

It is interesting to see market trends change dramatically in a short period of time. You still have plenty of budget and mid-range phones (under Rs 20,000) with a microSD card slot for expansion. But as you may have noticed, market growth has moved into higher territory with the average selling price of a phone in India rising from Rs 15,000 to over Rs 22,000 in the last few years.

And with that, the segment is on the decline even though shipments seem to be up. All of this suggests that there is more product supply than demand in the market, which is not ideal for any industry. The report mentions that Sandisk is the undisputed leader in storage packaging with a 70 percent share, followed by HP and Kingston in third place on the list.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for the storage industry, as the flash drive still retains consumer interest and demand, albeit from a different segment altogether. It will be interesting to see if cloud storage has a direct impact on the demand for USB drives in the near future, as it generally feels like pen drives are slowly but surely going out of fashion.

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