India is one of the largest smartphone markets in the world. 330 million phones were shipped in India in 2018, out of which 44% of were smartphones. Xiaomi led with 28% market share in the smartphone segment.
Xiaomi’s offline presence in the country is certainly to be credited for this feat as until now, they were exclusively online. That being said, online smartphone shipments came in at 36%.
Despite the smartphone market growing, don’t count feature phones out yet. This year, they managed to outpace smartphones’ year-over-year adoption rate. That on its own is a surprising feat!
Undoubtedly, Jio is king of that with 38% of the market thanks to their
Counterpoint Research has reminded us that the numbers do not necessarily mean there’s no room for competition. They want the market to pay attention to Realme. Realme entered the Top 5 in its third quarter of operation, outpacing parent company Oppo. Realme got to 4 million users faster than anyone before it.
That being said, Realme shoudn’t get cocky. The fastest growing brand (proportionally) was Tecno, which is up 221% in 2018 due to their expanded offline presence. It’s followed by Honor (183%), Infinix (146%) and Nokia/HMD (138%).
OnePlus grew 58% year over year, becoming the fastest-growing premium smartphone brand. The Indian market in general is shifting towards more expensive phones – the Rs20-30,000 segment grew the fastest, compared to 2017 when the INR 10-15,000 segment saw the largest growth.
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