- For the first time, Xiaomi became the Indian number one smartphone brand, replacing the long time smartphone market leader Samsung.
Chinese phone maker Xiaomi has for the first time became an Indian smartphone market leader replacing Korea’s Samsung, which had held the position for several years, as per IDC data from October-December.
Xiaomi topped the market for the fourth quarter with a 16 percent share trailed by Samsung and Reliance Retail, which is selling the JioPhone, IDC said. It didn’t give the numbers for players No. 2 and 3.
Xiaomi India’s head and global vice president, Manu Jain, told ET that Xiaomi smartphones will be enough to surpass the feature phones and smartphones put together by Samsung and Reliance Retail.
Xiaomi also emerged as the market leader reporting annual shipments of 43.6 million units in 2019, the highest smartphone shipments ever made by any company in a year, rising by 9.2 percent year-on-year, said IDC. On the other hand, Samsung fell 2.8 percent year-on-year, leaving it with a 20.3 percent market share versus 28.6 percent of Xiaomi in 2019.
In 2019, Vivo, Oppo, and Realme followed the top two brands with 10%, 7.2%, and 3.2% shares respectively.
With a market share of 47.4 percent in 2019, Apple surpassed Samsung in the premium (US$ 500 +) category, powered by significant price drops on previous-generation models and a lower iPhone 11 launch price compared with the iPhone XR.
Due to the limited success rate of the 4 G feature phone, the overall Indian mobile phone market shrank by 12.5 percent with an annual shipment of 282.9 million units in the previous year. In 2019, the smartphone segment shipped 152.5 million units, a “modest” 8 percent year-over-year rise, but that was enough to drive India into the second-largest smartphone market, surpassing the US and trailing China.
“IDC expects also modest single-digit growth in the smartphone market in India in 2020. As organic growth becomes challenging with increasing replacement cycles, the smartphone ecosystem must put its energy and focus on enabling migration of India’s massive feature phone user base, as well as continuing to offer compelling proposals in the mid-premium segment to boost faster upgrades, “said IDC India’s research director Navkendar Singh, Client Devices & IPDS.
Offline phone sales were weighed down by exclusive models being sold on e-commerce sites, pilling up inventory for brick-and-mortar stores and resulting in the offline channel’s marginal annual growth of 1.6 percent in 2019.
