Despite a strong year over year growth by the Indian market, Samsung’s performance appeared to remain at a standstill in the first quarter of 2017. The company managed to retain its position as the number one smartphone vendor in the country however, Chinese smartphone makers are quickly catching up. The information comes from a report by mobile and IT industry analyst Canalys.
In Q1 2017, the Indian smartphone market registered a year over year growth of over 12 percent. According to Canalys, a total of 27 million smartphones were shipped in the first quarter of 2017. While Samsung aced the charts with a 22 percent market share, Xiaomi and Vivo came second and third with 14 and 11 percent respectively. While Xiaomi’s 3 percent year over year growth was put down to its online-only strategy, Vivo’s success was put down to the fragmented retail market.
All things considered, Samsung’s less than spectacular performance is not entirely unexpected. After all, the company’s Note 7 device turned out to be a huge fiasco more than anything else. And when your flagship device starts exploding all over the place, your sales are going to be hit. Indeed, that Samsung managed to maintain its position on the top, speaks volumes about the kind of inertia the company has built up over the years.
Now that it has managed to put Note 7 behind it, we can expect the South Korean manufacturer to grab some momentum. Especially since its Galaxy S8 devices are doing all to well. As per the Korea herald:
Samsung started to receive pre-orders for the S8 and its larger sibling [the] S8 Plus on April 19 and the pre-orders reached 80,000 in a week — four times more than the pre-booking for the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge — on pace to hit 150,000 before its official introduction on May 5 [in India].
Meanwhile, the smartphone scenario in India has gotten altogether too interesting. You have domestic companies losing traction on one hand, while Chinese manufacturers are rapidly gobbling up market share. While Apple was not featured in Canalys’ report due to a meager 2 percent share, it has the potential to grow in the Indian market as well.
All in all, we are going to see quite a bit of competition in the Indian smartphone landscape. The country is a huge prize and has a lot of potential customers. As such we can expect all of these companies to be trying their best to grab the lion’s share of the market.
