Xiaomi leads in smartphone and Jio in featurephone in Q1, 2018

Xiaomi continued to lead the Indian smartphone market for the second successive quarter and Jio continued to lead the feature phone market, both crossing a record 30% market share respectively in Q1, 2018 as per Counterpoint report.

According to the report, India’s overall mobile phone shipments grew 48% Y-o-Y in Q1 2018. The market was driven by the feature phone segment which doubled in Q1 2018 due to strong shipments of Reliance JioPhone, while the smartphone market remained flat Y-o-Y.

Commenting on the findings, Karn Chauhan, Research Analyst, Counterpoint said, “Q1 2018 started off with some brands sitting on inventory post the festive season in Q4 2017, which continued throughout the quarter as industry moves to a full view display portfolio. Furthermore, the quarter was also marked with less than normal smartphone launches as very few brands refreshed their portfolio, except for Xiaomi and Samsung which benefitted from the new launches. However, we expect the demand to start picking up from early Q2 2018 onwards, driven by faster replacement rate of existing 2G and 3G smartphone users upgrading to 4G mobile phones.”

Q1 Mobile Phone India Summary:

• Chinese brands accounted for 57% of the total smartphone market in Q1 2018, up from 53% during Q1, 2017
• In smartphone, Xiaomi maintained its lead in Q1, 2018 with a record 31% market share followed by Samsung (26%), Vivo (6%), OPPO (6%), and Honor (3%)
• China based Transsion Group (the holding group of Tecno, Itel and Infinix) has become the fifth largest player with 4% market share
• The race for the fifth position is quite close between Lava, Micromax, Honor, Nokia (HMD) and Lenovo (+Moto) brands
• Honor (146%), Xiaomi (134%) and OnePlus (112%) were the fastest growing smartphone brands in Q1 2018
• In the featurephone segment, Reliance Jio now captures more than one-third of the total featurephone market
• Itel, is the third largest player in the feature phone segment with 17% growth YoY in Q1 2018

Source: Counterpoint

Commenting on the competitive landscape, Anshika Jain, Research Analyst, Counterpoint said, “This is the first time that the top five smartphone brands accounted for more than 70% market share in a single quarter, which could accelerate exits and possibly consolidation. Xiaomi and Samsung alone captured 58% of the total smartphone market. Xiaomi’s performance is driven by rising product-pull in the offline market, building upon its strong presence in the online channel where it captured a record 57% share. Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 5 and 5 Pro were the most popular models whereas Samsung Galaxy J7 NXT and J2 (2017) drove volumes for the Korean vendor.”

“The demand for JioPhone continued through Q1 2018 as Reliance Jio’s feature phone market share raced from 0% last year to 36% in Q1 2018. This demand was catalysed by the introduction of a cheaper data plan, for the JioPhone in January: INR 49 per month including unlimited voice calling and 1 GB of data per month. Additionally, Jio has been aggressively promoting JioPhone as “India’s free smartphone” though technically, a smart feature phone to attract the large base of 2G voice users which prefer the simpler feature phone form-factor,” added Pathak.