Samsung loses mobile phone crown in India, smartphone crown in China
If took an almighty effort from Apple and Samsung to dethrone Nokia from the top and then it took mightier effort from Samsung to dethrone Apple from the top. Yet, time and again, Apple hits the top once in a while. If Nokia had the following that Samsung has right now, Nokia would have shut the shop years ago. Unlike Apple and Nokia that have extremely loyal user base, Samsung has a user base with a mentality “you keep us happy and we stay”. The last time we saw a large fan base for Samsung was when they were on the rise with Galaxy S2 and S3 launch. Since the release of Galaxy S3, Samsung has hardly made any innovation in smartphone design. Heck, even the flexible display smartphone was another Galaxy S3 clone. To make it worse, Samsung released nearly 100 phones since 2012 that look like Galaxy S3 and most of these phones came with inferior specs. The effect is felt now.
Samsung reported huge drop in mobile phone and smartphone market share, IDC reported that Samsung lost huge chunk of global smartphone sales. Today, Canalys and Counterpoint research reported the worst news to date w.r.t Samsung. Micromax is now the largest mobile phone manufacturer in India (smartphone + feature phone sales) while Xiaomi is the largest smartphone maker in China. In India feature phone sales, Samsung slid to fourth place with single digit market share.
China smartphone sales
With nearly 15 million smartphone sales, Xiaomi took the top spot with ease in Q2 2014 and Samsung, with 13.228 million units shipped, took the second spot. It is not going to get any better for Samsung as Lenovo is just 200,000 units short in third place. Yulong and Huawei rounded out the top five places. Not to forget that This is going to be an extremely difficult year for Samsung Xiaomi has recently launched Mi4 smartphone which is going to sell like hot cakes and Apple is going to release new iPhones by end of this year, unless they release breathtakingly good Note 4 with a design that does not resemble previous Galaxy phones. Xiaomi, Lenovo, Huawei and Oppo have been aggressively expanding into other countries and started eating into Samsung’s market share while brands like OnePlus will start eating into Samsung’s flagship sales.
India mobile phone sales
With 16.6% of market share, Micromax took the top spot in Indian mobile phone market while Samsung came in close second with 14.4% of market share. Nokia took third spot with 9.5% of market share while Karbonn and Lava rounded out the top 5. It is rather interesting to see that these Indian brands now control nearly a third of the sales in India but soon, they will face intense pressure from Chinese rivals like Xiaomi, OnePlus, Huawei and Oppo. By the end of the year, we should see Nokia pushed to no.5 or lower rank and if the downturn continues for Samsung, they will be pushed to no.3 or no.4 spot.
We do hope that Samsung soon realizes the need for innovation in design and hope that instead of focusing too much on adding bloat ware to the OS, they start designing better looking phones. If Google’s Android One project takes off and turns out to be instant hit, Samsung may face dis-integration like Motorola and that can happen faster than one can expect.
