SAMSUNG continuous to be the leader in India market
India's smartphone market has changed radically over the past six months, with Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi,Oppo,Vivo and Lenovo are investing heavily into India market. The question is are they getting the right market share? The fight is to target the long standing No.1 market leader Samsung Electronics, after tweaking its pricing strategy and extending its chain of physical stores.
Price-conscious Indian buyers had opportunities to buy handsets ranging from 5,000- 15,000 rupees. With the Indian market and its population of more than 1 billion people still offering huge scope for growth. The approach of getting into the multi-channel , online and offline sales could give boost in sales.
Local manufacturing base of Xiaomi helped the company by working closely with the component suppliers to research setting up factories in India next to its assembly plants. At the same time, Xiaomi buys components from around the world, including in China, South Korea and Japan. At present, 95% of its handsets sold in India are assembled at two factories in the country's south. Local assembly has been a major factor in keeping its prices low.
Whereas, Samsung face competition from Xiaomi's aggressive pricing. The market intelligence says, trust level with SAMSUNG as the South Korean brand remains strong, along with its distribution network, vendors approach, retailers relationship with attractive offers, made stronger position in compare to the other Chinese brands.
Smartphone makers are rushing into India as the country battles to position as the world's second largest smartphone market, after China. Smartphone sales in India rose 8% to 29.5 million units in the quarter ended March, according to estimates by market analysts Canalys. During the quarter ended September, India's smartphone shipments grew 23% year-on-year to reach just over 40 million units, briefly overtaking the U.S. However, Apple began assembling parts in India just last year after largely ignoring the market. It is still far behind in the local devices market, with less than 2% share, and lost its place at the top of India's high-end smartphone market in the January-March quarter. The reason of decreasing sales of Apple in India could be, Apple phones are too expensive for many Indian consumers, and Apple's core services such as Apple Maps and Siri don't work well locally, that may be the reason Now Apple allows Alexa (Smart Assistance) on its to join the smart speaker market .
The data received till the end of March by CMR showed that Samsung still dominated the Indian market with 30.8% installed base, whereas Chinese players such as Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo despite recording high shipment share over the last two quarter had some catching up to do with Korean smartphone manufacturing giant with 8.53%, 5.63% and 5.02% installed base respectively.
Micromax remained the only Indian brand among the top five in terms of installed base with 8.63% of the market share among smartphones, according to CMR.
Another study by counterpoint research says, has detailed the market share of all the mobile phone brands for Q1 2018. Three prominent brands have surfaced with decent numbers, out of which Samsung has posted the highest - 29 per cent of all flagship smartphone sales. The model responsible for this dominating score is their 2018 flagship Galaxy S9. The bigger Galaxy S9+ with a variable aperture dual camera consists of a total of 17 per cent market share whereas the smaller S9 consists of 12 per cent. Not only the S9, but even the slightly more affordable yet premium Galaxy A8+ (2019) also helped Samsung add a sizeable amount of numbers. Overall, Samsung comprised of a total of 50 per cent of all smartphone sold in the first quarter of 2018.
Lastly, the premium smartphone market in India contributes to 4% of the overall smartphone market in India, still in the nascent stages as the overall smartphone user base is still less mature and the top three brands are Samsung, OnePlus and Apple contributed to 95% of the overall premium.
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