You must have heard the “Be Indian and buy Indian” slogan number of times but this seems to be replaced by ‘Be Indian and buy Chinese’, as the Chinese smartphone brands like Lenovo, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo have acquiring the Indian market and overcoming the native brands consecutively. Now, the latest report by International Research Corporation (IDC) has declared the list of top five vendors which states that the smartphone shipment in the fourth quarter has reached 25.8 million units in 2016.
In 2015, similar volumes decline was recorded at 20.3 percent over the prior quarter, whereas the Indian mobile market has rolled out 109.1 million units of smartphone shipments in 2016 with 5.2 percent of the marginal annual growth in 2016. However, the IDC report said that the low consumer sales in the Q4 were due to the seasonal decline after festival season joined with the demonetization-impact.
“This is relatively lower than expected smartphone shipments for India owing to sluggish first half and demonetisation at the end of the year” Karthik J, Senior Market Analyst, IDC said in a press statement.
The report says that the South Korean tech firm Samsung is still the market leader with a share of 25.1 percent which is 13.1 percent decline in the Q4 of 2016. Having said this, the annual shipment of Samsung mobiles were going up by 3.2 percent in 2016 which is driven mainly by the J-series smartphones.
The rest of the top positions were acquired by the Chinese brands like Xiaomi with 10.7 percent market share, Lenovo (including Motorola) on the third position with 9.9 percent market share, followed by Oppo and Vivo with 8.6 percent and 7.6 percent shares respectively.
Furthermore, the report states that the share of Chinese vendors in the smartphone market has touched a huge 46 percent in the quarter ended December last year. The shipment during this period was doubled when compared with the same period last year. On the other hand, the share of homegrown vendors was declined to 19 percent. The report also says that this is the first time when the Indian smartphone vendors weren’t able to get a place in the top five list.