Samsung, Micromax, Intex smartphone shares fall as Chinese vendors surge in Q2: Counterpoint

NEW DELHI: Korea's Samsung has maintained its lead in the smartphone market in India which grew 15% on year, driven by Chinese vendors which ate into the pie of established players, according to Counterpoint Technologies.

The study by the Hong Kong-based research firm showed that Chinese smartphone vendors such as Lenovo, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi and LeEco captured almost 27% combined share of the India's total smartphone market. The shipments from Chinese brands surged 80% on-year in the quarter.

Samsung's share dropped to 25.6% from 29% in last quarter, while No. 2 player Micromax's share fell to 14.1% in the quarter from 17% in the previous quarter. Intex saw a decline of 1.5 percentage points sequentially in its market share to 8.5% in the second quarter. Lava and Lenovo (including Motorola) maintained their third and fourths. Motorola is contributing to more than 25% of the Lenovo's total smartphones, the report said.

Reliance's Lyf smartphones maintained the fifth spot but the brand's "sell-through has been not upto the expectations due to further delay to the launch of commercial LTE network services (of Reliance Jio Infocomm). As a result that brand has been sitting on high inventory during the quarter," Counterpoint said.In spite of being one of the fastest growing smartphone market globally, smartphone and hence internet penetration growth in India has slowed down a bit, only one in five users owns a smartphone or is connected to the internet.

"This has been mainly due to lack of localization and multi-lingual support in today's mass-market phones," Pavel Naiya, Analyst at Counterpoint said. "In light of this, since last 12 months domestic brands such as Micromax, Karbonn, Lava and so forth have launched devices with deeper integra tion and customization to support multiple native languages in effort to rope in next half a billion users which do not speak, read or write in English or Hindi as their first languages."

The market research firm estimates that by end of 2016 more than 10 million smartphone users will have phone supporting atleast more than 12 languages and this will be very important trend every smartphone maker will have to follow to further penetrate in Indian smartphone market.

Consequently, feature phones maintained a consistent shipment share of 56% in the second quarter with the rest being smartphones. Almost a third of the total smartphones were sold through online channels in the quarter.

The shipments of smartphones supporting 4G LTE technology however grew 264% on-year in the quarter. The study showed that two out of every three smartphones shipped in India were LTE capable.$100-$150 price band saw a yearly growth of over 48% in terms of shipments, while more than 60% of the smartphones shipped sported a 5 inch or larger display.

The number of brands manufacturing/assembling domestically jumped from 10 brands to 35 brands now contributing to almost 70% of the total smartphones production volume in Q2 2016. However, lack of component ecosystem is still a barrier to increase local value addition, Counterpoint said.Android now controls 97% share of the total smartphone shipments, however, Android's old versions like KitKat and Lollipop still contribute to 89% of the total Android shipments. Counterpoint said that deeper customized Android variants are gaining ground especially in need for regional languages support driven by startups such as Indus OS and others.

While Mediatek was the leading smartphone chipset supplier with 32% share, Qualcomm dominated the LTE based smartphone sub segment with 45% share.

Source: Samsung, Micromax, Intex smartphone shares fall as Chinese vendors surge in Q2: Counterpoint