Samsung beats Xiaomi, becomes number one in India

The fight to get the majority smartphone market share in one of the toughest and largest markets, India, is on. This time Samsung seems to have won it as it has ‘toppled’ Xiaomi to claim the top spot in the country in Q2 this year, according to Counterpoint research.
The report says that the smartphone market returned to its double-digit growth year-on-year by 18%. Based on the latest figures, Samsung achieved 29% market share in the country.

This is 5% more than what the South Korean tech firm achieved in the same quarter last year. Samsung was closely followed by Xiaomi that got 28%. The Chinese tech firm got a massive jump in the last one year. It captured 16% market share in Q2 2017 according to Counterpoint.

Other three Chinese smartphone brands that took the third, fourth and fifth spot are Vivo, Oppo and Honor, which is a sub-brand of Huawei. The three brands achieved 12%, 10% and 3% respectively. While Honor moved up from 1% in Q2 2017, Oppo (including Realme) stayed flat with 10% and Vivo dropped by 1%. The ‘Others’ segment captured the remaining 18%.

Also mentioned was that the top five brand together took control of 82% of the total smartphone market, of which OnePlus (284%), Honor (188%) and Xiaomi (112%) were the fastest growing brands annually.

Commenting on this, research analyst Anshika Jain said that, “As volume share of the top five players grew more than 80%, local and smaller players were forced to change their strategy which involved changing channels and product strategy along with cutting down on SKUs. Additionally, the increase in duties for handset components announced during the starting of the quarter, forced smaller players to delay their product launches as they don’t have necessary operations to save on the increased tariffs for certain components like populated printed circuit boards, mechanics and others.”

It was added that the feature phone market also saw a growth of 21% YoY, out-spacing smartphone market.