India’s Smartphone shipment declines sharply

There are reports on the performance of India's smartphone shipments; it has reportedly declined 9% year-on-year to reach over 152 million units in 2022, as per Counterpoint research. Despite declining shipments, the premium smartphone market’s share kept rising in 2022 and reached 11%, the highest ever.

The worldwide smartphone shipments declined 18.3% year over year to 300.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022 (4Q22), as reported by IDC. The drop marks the largest-ever decline in a single quarter and contributed to a steep 11.3% decline for the year. 2022 ended with shipments of 1.21 billion units, which represents the lowest annual shipment total since 2013 due to significantly dampened consumer demand, inflation, and economic uncertainties. This tough close to the year puts the 2.8% recovery expected for 2023 in serious jeopardy with heavy downward risk to the forecast.

Samsung led the market in 2022 in terms of shipment value share with a 22% share, followed by Apple at 18%. In terms of shipment volume, Xiaomi led the market in 2022 with a 20% share.

It has been attributed to the decline in the Consumer demand from the second quarter when the global economy was crippled by multiple macroeconomic issues like all-time high inflation, rising unemployment and geopolitical conflicts, affecting India’s economy as well.

Secondly, Inventory build-up across channels after the second quarter led to lower-than-expected shipments throughout the second half of the year.

The Year-on-Year decline, which is the second ever in India’s smartphone market, can be attributed to the decline in entry-level and budget segments which faced supply constraints at the beginning of the year and then witnessed lower demand throughout the year. However, the premium segment continued to rise and captured a double-digit share for the first time, leading to growth in retail ASP.

Experts say this paradoxical trend implies that India’s smartphone market is moving from being volume-driven to value-driven. While entry-tier and budget segments were most affected, the premium segment remained immune and showed double-digit growth. We believe that the inventory and demand situation will continue to affect the market in the first half of 2023 before improving in the latter half driven by the festive season and upgrades to 5G devices.

This was witnessed as the Online channels clocked a record 58% share, propelled by e-commerce festival season sales like Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Amazon Great India Festival. Offline shipments, however, declined by 20% Year-on-Year as they struggled to generate demand while competing with aggressive online plays.