Irrespective of the second wave of COVID, India’s networking market, which includes Ethernet Switch, Routers, and WLAN segments, witnessed a reasonable 14.1% year-over-year (YoY) growth in terms of vendor revenues during 2Q21 (April – June).
According to a study by International Data Corporation (IDC), the increased YoY growth could be attributed to the weak base last year caused by the first wave of the pandemic.
However, Indian enterprises continued to invest in network infrastructure and the overall vendor revenues grew 5.6% sequentially irrespective of the second wave of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, switching business in India had a strong 20.9% YoY growth during 2Q21. The very high growth could be attributed to a very slow 2Q20. However, the non-DC switching business, which remained slow due to the shutdown of campuses grew by 38.5% YoY, anticipating the hybrid work trend to be prevalent in the new normal.
Key industries that contributed to the switching business include professional services, telecommunications, process manufacturing, and banking.
In the meantime, India’s router market too expanded by 18.6% YoY. Both the enterprise and service provider segments grew by 20.3% and 18% YoY, respectively.
Service providers were investing in routing hardware, majorly around optimizing capacities and building edge data centers, to enable enterprise use cases. Apart from telecom, other key verticals for routing include professional services, process manufacturing, and banking.
The WLAN segment declined marginally by 7.0% YoY. Consumer gateway routers declined by 23.7% after a massive spike in revenues for the last four quarters. The market was flooded with an excess supply of gateway routers which caused the eventual slowdown during 2Q21.
Enterprise-class wireless, however, sustained the recovery by growing 11.5% YoY. Enterprises were investing in access points, anticipating the hybrid work scenario once offices open. Wi-Fi 6 is gradually becoming the de facto technology, thereby rapidly expanding the access layer to facilitate a variety of enterprise applications.
