India’s smartphone market saw its highest ever shipments thanks to aggressive sales by e-commerce players like Amazon and Flipkart in the third quarter of 2018, according to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
India’s smartphone shipments reached a peak of 42.6 million which was a 9.1 yearly growth. Interestingly, IDC’s data is in contrast with another research firm Canalys, which had said that India’s smartphone shipments actually declined by 1 per cent and that the shipments stood at 40.6 million.
IDC claims that this is in fact the first time that the smartphone market is on par with the feature phone market, and both contributed 50 per cent to the overall mobile phone market in the country. Traditionally feature phones continue to outship smartphones in India, despite the rising popularity of the latter.
According to IDC, shipments “were primarily driven by the eTailer channel in preparation for the multiple sale events in the run-up to the Diwali festival.” The festival of Diwali, which is usually seen as driving sales for products across categories, took place in November first week this time.
However, both Flipkart and Amazon had various pre-Diwali sales all of October with aggressive focus on smartphones.
“Strong online exclusive portfolios driven by brands like Xiaomi, Honor, Realme, Asus, OnePlus, resulted in quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) growth of 37% taking the online share to 39% in the quarter,” Upasana Joshi Associate Research Manager, Channel Research, IDC India said in a press statement.
The offline channel continues to dominate India’s smartphone segment with around 60 per cent share, though it had a slower than annual growth.
The winner in this quarter was still Xiaomi with the number one position and a market share of 27 per cent and around 11.7 million shipments. Canalys had put Xiaomi’s shipments at 12 million for the quarter. Redmi 5A, Redmi Note 5 Pro and Redmi 6 portfolio helped drive sales for Xiaomi, notes IDC.
The one year old Redmi 5A remained a best-seller. Combined with Redmi Note 5 Pro, the two phones saw more than 5 million shipments in two consecutive quarters. Xiaomi also occupied a share of 48.9 per cent in online channel.
Samsung remained at the second position, though it continues to lose share in place of competition from Xiaomi, vivo and Oppo. Samsung’s Infinity series helped it grow by 4.8 per cent annually in the third quarter, which was limited compared to players like Xiaomi, vivo. Shipments stood at 9.6 million for Samsung.
The winner in this quarter was still Xiaomi with the number one position and a market share of 27 per cent and around 11.7 million shipments.
vivo was number three with impressive yearly growth of 35.4 per cent in the quarter. IDC credits the Y81 and Y83 Pro for helping pick up demand for vivo products, though vivo Y71 remained its top selling model.
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