India’s overall networking market which includes Ethernet Switch, Routers, and WLAN segments witnessed a 4.2% year-over-year (YoY) decline in Q4 2020 (Oct-Dec) according to latest release by International Data Corporation (IDC).
The decline during Q4 2020 was majorly characterized by the decline in switching revenues. The switching business in India declined by 11.1% YoY during the quarter. The market for routing was stagnant with a marginal decline of 1% YoY. However, from a sequential standpoint the router market expanded by 30% during Q4 2020 mainly attributed by the telecom service providers.
The ADC market also posed a significant growth during Q4 2020 with a YoY growth of 22.9%. The ADC segment is starting to see good traction in terms of virtual appliances to cater to the workloads shifting to the cloud. Key verticals for the ADC business include banking, professional services, and government.
India Ethernet Switch Market Q4 2020
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker, the Q4 2020 Ethernet Switch market in India stood at USD 126.9 million (by vendor revenue) registering a YoY decline of 11.1%. Decline in the switching segment was majorly characterized by the Non-DC segment. The decline was due to the COVID impact and variations in refresh cycles. Professional services, manufacturing, and banking were some of the key business verticals that maintained their spending. Manufacturing showed strong signs of recovery with investments from multiple sub-segments like automobiles, pharma, hi-tech, etc. However, government business continued to be slow with some key businesses being pushed to CY 2021.
Despite the market showing signs of recovery, business returning to per-COVID levels is still uncertain with India suspected to move into the second wave of the pandemic.
Cisco continued to dominate the Ethernet Switch market with a 51.8% share during Q4 2020, followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Huawei.
India Router Market Q4 2020
According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Router Tracker, the India Router market stood at USD 75.0 million (by vendor revenue) with a marginal YoY decline of 1.0% in Q4 2020. However, from a sequential point of view, the market grew by 30% majorly driven by the telecom service providers. Telecom vendor investments were pertaining to cater to the additional bandwidth requirements driven by the work from home scenario. Professional services and banking were the key business verticals during Q4 2020. Investment from the government remained slow during Q4 2020. Business for routers is expected to recover to with telecom vendors investing for 5G rollouts in India.
Cisco leads the router market with 55.1% market share in Q4 2020 followed by Nokia and Juniper.
Sudharsan Raghunathan, Senior Market Analyst, Enterprise Networking, IDC India says, “With more and more applications moving into cloud, the demand for software-defined technologies like SD-WAN is gaining significant adoption in India. The networking ecosystem is undergoing a paradigm shift in terms of vendors partnering with multiple cloud providers that enable seamless access to IaaS and SaaS applications in a secured manner. The usage of on-ramps for cloud has played a very important role in connecting branch sites to cloud applications effectively. The prolonging remote working scenario will also promote more cloud delivered models of SD-WAN wherein employees working from home would be able to access cloud applications without hardware dependency."
