Indian phone brands such as Micromax and Lava could soon offer devices with four times more memory.
SanDisk, a maker of memory cards that go into phones and other devices, is in talks with Indian phone companies to embed a 128-GB memory card with the devices.
Most phones in the market come with a 32-GB inbuilt memory, with the exception of brands such as iPhone, which comes with an inbuilt memory of 128 GB. With 128 GB you can store 32,000 mp3 songs or photos compared with 8,000 in a 32GB phone.
The SanDisk card will be part of the internal memory of a smartphone. “We are talking to the leading Indian companies and will make an announcement soon,” said Pankaj Mehra, Senior Fellow, SanDisk, at CeBIT India.
Vivek Tyagi, Director, Business Development, Commercial sales and support, SanDisk India, said that with usage of data storage rising, customers want cards that can store large data volumes.
SanDisk is making these moves at a time when smartphone penetration is on the rise with around 200 million smartphones sold in India last year, according to analyst estimates. This also coincides with the rise of homegrown phone-makers such as Micromax, Karbonn, LAVA, Intex and Celkon, which have together cornered a majority share of the phone market.
However, industry watchers feel flash memory cards are still too costly for entry-level phones. The price difference could be upwards of 10 per cent, they say. Indian consumers will prefer buying separate memory cards if the price is not low, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, analyst at Greyhound Research.
But the addressable market for embedded flash memory is expected to increase from $12 billion in 2013 to $18 billion by 2020, according to analysts.