Qualcomm Eyes PC Market Expansion In India In 2025 With Snapdragon-Powered Devices

Qualcomm is ready to invest in India in 2025 to grow its PC business, a key top executive at the chip-making giant told Acko Byte. This comes at a significant time as India's personal computing market hit a milestone, with total shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations reaching 4.49 million units in the third quarter (Q3), according to International Data Corporation (IDC).

Investment Signals Major Market Push

"So we are looking at our entrance into the PC space (in India) in phases. We launched literally just in July, which is a few months ago... India is part of that 2025 push. So what you will see is more investment in 2025, specifically for compute," Don McGuire, Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer told Acko Byte on the sidelines of Snapdragon Insiders Elite Festival 2024 in Gurugram.

Qualcomm's Phased Approach

It is to be noted that Asus, Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Samsung, and Acer have already unveiled their Snapdragon-powered devices in India.

"India is part of that growth phase for us. So, even though we have some devices in India market and we are selling some devices here in India, we have not put a full push in the Indian market yet, for our PC business," the Qualcomm marketing boss noted.

"And we are focused on a few markets for our launches and in 2025, we are going to enter our growth space, and then beyond that we will scale globally," McGuire added.

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Market Strategy

The San Diego, California-headquartered chip giant said that it has to fill many retail gaps in the country. Highlighting the company's market strategy, McGuire explained: "We we have to fill gaps at present at retail, such as OEM programmes, channel programmes. All those things have to be completely filled in, in order for us to really hit the throttle and drive success. And that's what we're going to be working on in 2025 for the Indian market."

Notably, despite the overall India market's modest growth, the desktop segment encountered a decline of 8.1 per cent year-over-year in Q3. 

Meanwhile, notebooks and workstations demonstrated marginal positive momentum, with growth rates of 2.8 per cent and 2.4 per cent, respectively.