Samsung begins losing market share to Chinese players in India for the first time in 6 years

Key highlights:

• Samsung continues to be the No 1 brand in the country for six consecutive years, including 2017
• Xiaomi came on the foot heels of Samsung with a 16.2% market share in India
• Samsung has seen a large drop in its market share in smartphones as well as feature phones

It has been nearly a decade of smartphones in India and Samsung continues to rule the charts for six consecutive years. 

Samsung, in Q2 2017, sold nearly every fifth smartphone in the country. In feature phones too, it had the largest market share at 22.3%, according to a CMR India report.

But this long winning streak is now losing some steam as Chinese smartphone are tightening their grip. Xiaomi, which entered the Indian market just 3 years ago, has seen the highest growth in the Indian smartphone market and is now at No. 2 spot.

Source: CMR India

Xiaomi came on the foot heels of Samsung with a 16.2% market share in the Indian smartphone market in Q2 2017. This is a huge rise for the Chinese smartphone company that had a 13.88% market share in Q1 2017.

In comparison, Samsung has seen a large drop in its market share, which was at an unbeatable 28.61% just in the last quarter.

Even the feature phone market, Samsung's seems to have lost a lot of ground to Chinese mobile phone manufacturer Itel.

Samsung's market share in the feature phone segment has declined to 22.3% in Q2 2017 from 26.23% in Q1 2017. While Itel's market share has increased from to 19% in Q2 2017 from just 8.58% in Q1 2017.

CMR said that with several Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Lenovo, Vivo, Oppo and iTel showing growth in the range of 7 – 33% in Smartphones (iTel being the exception with growth of 293% on a small unit base), the focus is now all about competition among these brands to occupy the leading positions in the market.

Source: CMR India - Q1 2017

Thomas George, Senior Vice President and Head CMR said, “As Smartphones complete its first decade in India, Samsung will continue to enjoy the market leadership, 6th time in a row. He however, cautioned that though it will continue to leverage the offline physical reach and access, there has to be a clusterised strategy for each of the geo-markets in the country Samsung will have to adopt.”

Xiaomi was among ace performers in the quarter not only taking it to No 2 in the Smartphone market in India but also contributing to the revival of 4000 – 6000 price segment of the market. The segment witnessed 55% growth sequentially. CMR believes that going forward, the entry level Smartphone market will see a lot more action for few quarters from now onwards.

In addition, the report also pointed out that Foxconn owned Rising Star India, overtook Samsung as the No 1 original design manufacturers (ODM) for Smartphones making phones in India. However, Samsung, continues to be the overall leader ODM in country.

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