OPPO and Vivo lose massive market share in India in 2017

IDCs numbers on India smartphone sales are out for the year 2017. Samsung has managed to maintain the lead for yearly sales but lost to Xiaomi in the final quarter of 2017. The good news is that the country has recorded 14% YoY growth. We may see reduced number of Oppo and Vivo boards across the country as sales for these two brands dropped dramatically. Both brands saw sales nearly halved in final quarter fo the year. Overall, 124 million smartphones were shipped in India.

Samsung managed to stay at the top of the pack in 2017 but we are not sure what 2018 would hold for Samsung. Xiaomi managed to get really close to Samsung, thanks to super hit Redmi series. Vivo remained distant third along with Lenovo in fourth and OPPO in fifth. Coming to premium smartphone sales, Samsung and Apple completely dominated sales and reaped in major profits. Coming to Feature phone sales, Samsung again dominated the market, with 20.5% share. Transsion, Micromax, Reliance and Lava took next four spots.

For final quarter fo 2017, Xiaomi took the crown from Samsung, with 26.8% of share. Samsung dropped to second place. Samsung also dropped to the second spot in feature phone sales, with Reliance taking the lead due to strong Jio Phone sales. Vivo, Lenovo and OPPO rounded off the top five smartphone makers list and Transsion, Micromax and Lava rounded out top five feature phones list.

Commenting on the key trends of 2017Q4, Upasana Joshi, Senior Market Analyst, IDC India “Xiaomi taking a lead over Samsung in the smartphone market and Reliance Jio emerging as the leading feature phone company in India were the two key highlights of the last quarter of 2017. Joshi adds further “The growth of both the vendors was propelled by their aggressive pricing. Xiaomi’s offline expansion and higher marketing spends were other key factors for the vendor’s high shipments in the seasonally low quarter.”

IDC Forecast

“While the competitive landscape is becoming more challenging in India, the low smartphone penetration remains a major attraction for all devices vendors, and they are now making serious attempts to address the problem of affordability in India with the introduction of more affordable products, resulting in initiatives such as Android Oreo ‘Go edition’, telco bundling with low cost 4G smartphones and even the 4G feature phone JioPhone,” says Singh. Also, as consumers experience and get hooked on to data, their need to be on a digital platform will go up and smartphones will be the first platform for many of them. IDC expects the Indian smartphone market to continue double-digit growth for next couple of years,” ends Singh.