It seems like India hasn’t had enough of their smartphone enthusiasm fulfilled. As we head deeper into 2019 and as the Indian population continues to move online, demand for smartphones are at their all-time high right now. Smartphone companies from China, namely, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Huawei and others have been keeping the competition competitive and exciting for the past few years and seem to show no signs of slow-down anytime soon in the region.
India remained one of the bright spots in an otherwise declining global smartphone market in 2018. Smartphone shipments in the country were up by more than 12 million at 137 million, the best growth of any market in absolute volume terms. India now accounts more than 10% of the world’s smartphone market, up from 6% five years ago. It is one of six markets in the top 20 that posted positive full-year growth, with its performance outshone by Indonesia (17.1%), Russia (14.1%) and Italy (10.0%). Of these four markets, India is the only one that has seen consecutive growth for the past three years, noted Canalys
The report published by Canalys clearly shows how the trends in India continue to snowball. According to the report, it seems like Xiaomi is continuing to lead the shipment charts covering 29.9% of India’s smartphone market share.
Xiaomi’s 1st place ranking in the Indian was definitely what we had expected. After all, Xiaomi had surpassed its goal last year with two months to spare. On top of that, additions like the Poco F1 and the likes of the new Mi 8 lineup simply put Xiaomi in a strong place.
Towards the end of the year, Xiaomi had branched out two brands that would act as separate entities under Xiaomi’s provision, Poco, and Redmi. And while Xiaomi is trying its best to keep the two garner their own shine, there definitely seems to be a whole lot of Xiaomi in them given how much Xiaomi promotes their two new branches compared to Huawei’s Honor sub-brand.
To put Xiaomi’s success into perspective, Xiaomi saw a monstrous 59.6% Y-O-Y growth from 2017 to 2018. Shipments landed in the 25.7 Million range in 2017 with 2018 shipment trailblazing their goal to 41 Million units in 2018, that too accounting for the Indian market alone.
Following Xiaomi’s reign, we get to see the likes of Samsung, Vivo, and Oppo making out the second, third and fourth place in the market. Samsung, Vivo, and Oppo recorded 20.4%, 14.3%, and 5.2% YOY growth during the same duration.
With Xiaomi dominating 2018 with such a monstrous margin, we would doubt that Xiaomi would be able to replicate the same success throughout 2019 in the Indian market. Doubts arise from the shifts that occurred in late 2018 with the introduction of Oppo’s highly-competition Realme brand and Samsung’s new Galaxy M20 series setting a tone to disrupt Xiaomi’s empire in the region.
Reports from Malaysian e-commerce websites had already reported the massive success Realme had garnered in Malaysia, at least from online sales, and it seems like the trend is very likely to continue if Xiaomi doesn’t put some juicy steaks on the table again.
By the looks of it, Xiaomi’s success for 2019 would hugely depend on their upcoming releases such as the Xiaomi Mi 9, Poco F2, Mi A3, Mi MiX 3 5G Edition, Mi MiX 4and Redmi Note 7. While that is a mouthful, Xiaomi’s timely releases do make a huge impact on how Xiaomi tilts the market with all the competition surrounding it.
