iWorld
Smartphone chip market to be worth US$ 5bn by ’22: Report
MUMBAI: GNSS Chip Market is estimated to be worth US$ 5.22 billion by 2022. Some of the factors driving the growth of the GNSS chip market include the high penetration of electronic, wearable, and connecting devices; increasing demand for accurate and real-time data; rising demand for high-speed Internet and network coverage such as 4G/5G; and growing popularity of IoT.
According to a new market research report, “GNSS Chip Market by Devices (Smartphones, In-Vehicle Systems, Tablets, Personal Navigation), Application (Location-Based Services, Navigation, Telematics, Surveying, Mapping, Timing & Synchronization), Vertical and Geography – Global Forecast to 2022,” published by MarketsandMarkets, the market, also covering India, is expected to be expanding at a CAGR of 7.9 per cent between 2016 and 2022.
The key players operating in the GNSS chip market include Qualcomm Incorporated (U.S.), STMicroelectronics N.V. (Switzerland), Intel Corporation (U.S.), Mediatek Inc. (Taiwan), U-Blox Holdings AG (Switzerland), Broadcom Corporation (U.S.), Furuno Electric Co., Ltd. (Japan), Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (U.S.), Quectel Wireless Solutions Co., Ltd. (China), and Navika Electronics (India).
“Smartphones to hold the largest size of the overall GNSS chip market”
Smartphones held the largest size of the GNSS chip market in 2015. GNSS chips in smartphones are used for applications such as location-based services (LBS), online games, and mobile geographic information systems (GISs), among others. Smartphones are expected to hold the largest size of the GNSS chip market during the forecast period due to the increasing demand in developing countries and the need for real-time information pertaining to the exact location of vehicles, individuals, and other assets. With the growing demand for smartphones, personal navigation devices, , and tablets, among others, are now equipped with GPS/GNSS receiver chips and navigation software to enable the users to navigate from one place to other. Due to the miniaturization of smartphones, the demand for GNSS chips is increasing. Also, the miniaturization of GNSS chips enables the chips to get integrated in small as well highly sensitive devices.
“Location-based services (LBS) to hold the largest share of GNSS”
The LBS application is expected to dominate the global GNSS chip market between 2016 and 2022. LBS are the most widely used applications in various devices such as smartphones, tablets, wearable devices, in-vehicle systems, and personal navigation devices. In addition, technological innovations and miniaturization of electronic devices have led to the increased demand for GNSS chips for consumer electronics products such as tablets, smartphones, laptops, and digital cameras, among others. LBS, on the basis of application, can be categorized into mapping, discovery and infotainment, emergency support and disaster management, leisure and social networking, location-based advertising, location-based games and augmented reality, and tracking, among others. All the aforementioned factors are driving the growth of the market for location-based services.
“APAC GNSS chip market expected to grow at a high rate”
APAC is expected to be the fastest-growing market for GNSS chip during the forecast period. This market growth can be attributed to the growth in the construction industry and the development of the transportation infrastructure in this region. The major factors responsible for the growth of these sectors include the rapid urbanisation and growing population. The construction industry in APAC would continue to account for the largest share of the GNSS chip market in the coming years. Due to the increasing adoption of IoT and portable consumer electronics devices in countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea, the GNSS chip market in
APAC is expected to grow at a high rate.
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eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
