Xiaomi on top, Huawei makes gains in India smartphone market, Vivo and Oppo lose: Counterpoint

Feature phone segment shows surprising growth powered by Reliance JioPhone which has 36 per cent market share

Xiaomi, Xiaomi India, Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, Redmi Note 5 Pro, Xiaomi India sales, Huawei, Counterpoint, Counterpoint India, India smartphone sales

Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 5 and 5 Pro were the most popular models for the Chinese brand, according to Counterpoint research data.

There seems to be a major churning happening in the Indian smartphone market. While Xiaomi is consolidating its position as the top vendor powered by its budget smartphones, at least two other Chinese brands seem to facing a severe erosion of their base, as per Counterpoint’s Market Monitor service. The report says that India’s overall mobile phone shipments grew 48 per cent YoY in Q1 2018 driven by Reliance JioPhone even as the smartphone market remained flat YoY.

Research analyst Karn Chauhan said the quarter had fewer launches and Xiaomi and Samsung both benefited from the new devices they launched. “However, we expect the demand to start picking up from early Q2 2018 onwards, driven by faster replacement rate of existing 2G and 3G smartphone users upgrading to 4G mobile phones.”

There was another interesting trend in the smartphone segment, where according to analyst Anshika Jain, for the first time the top five smartphone brands accounted for more than 70 per cent of the market share. Xiaomi with 31.1 per cent and and Samsung with 26.2 per cent captured close to 58 per cent of the total market. Interestingly, Xiaomi’s performance was not at the cost of Samsung, which has pretty much held on to its market share. In fact, it seems Oppo and Vivo for this growth as both were at almost half their market share of last year.

Story continues below this ad

Remarkably, Huawei’s Honor brand doubled its numbers to enter the top five for the first time. The report attributed this to “strong performance of Honor 9 Lite and Honor 7X across online channels”. The report has come a day before the company launches its flagship Huawei P20 Pro in the Indian market in a bid to take on Apple and Samsung in the higher price bands.

The over Rs 30,000 premium segment is now ruled by Samsung thanks to new flagships like the S9, S9 Plus and A8 Plus. OnePlus was placed second position with showing a 112 per cent growth which gave it a one-fourth share of the total premium segment.

The state of India’s smartphone and feature phone market in Q1, 2018, according to Counterpoint.

Tarun Pathak, Counterpoint’s Associate Director, attributed the jump in feature phone segment to the demand for JioPhones, which continued through Q1 2018 giving the device a 36 per cent share in Q1 2018. “This demand was catalysed by the introduction of a cheaper data plan, for the JioPhone in January: Rs 49 a month including unlimited voice calling and 1GB of data per month.

Additionally, Jio has been aggressively promoting JioPhone as “India’s free smartphone” though technically, a smart feature phone to attract the large base of 2G voice users which prefer the simpler feature phone form-factor.” He said the lack of vernacular/regional content, UI and good quality smartphones below Rs 2,700 has also helped JioPhone’s growth. Another interesting insight is that China-based Transsion Group which owns Tecno, Itel and Infinix has become the fifth largest player overall with a 4 per cent. Its Tecno smartphone brand is expected to enter the top 10 soon, the report said.