India is the second biggest smartphone market in the world, trumped only by China. This country has seen huge improvements in the smartphone department as more and more OEMs are pushing their devices over there. Indian consumers have plenty to choose from, and their local companies are also doing really well, especially Micromax and the Micromax-owned YU smartphone OEM. That being said, Counterpoint Research has released some market share data for the third quarter of this year in India, so, let’s take a look.
Samsung has been a leader in the Indian smartphone market for a while now, and it seems like that hasn’t changed in the third quarter of this year. Samsung holds 23.2% of the smartphone market in India, which means this Korea-based tech giant actually lost a part of the market, they accounted for 24.5% in Q2 2015. Micromax is 2nd placed according to Counterpoint Research, the India-based company holds 17.7% of the market, which means they actually managed to rise compared to Q2 when Micromax’s market share was 16.7%. Intex, Lenovo and Lava follow Samsung and Micromax, the three companies currently hold 11.7%, 9.8% and 6.6%, respectively.
As you can see, 3 out 5 companies on this list are actually India-based smartphone OEMs, which are great news for India. It will be interesting to see how will things play out in the fourth quarter of the year considering the holiday season is coming. Samsung seems unreachable at the moment, but considering that Micromax managed to grow in the third quarter, and Samsung lost some of its market share, the Indian smartphone OEM could get a bit closer to Samsung by the end of the year.
Indian smartphone market grew immensely in the last year or so, numerous smartphone OEMs started selling their devices in that Asian country, and their very own companies are also doing really well at the moment. YU, a company which we mentioned earlier, is actually very interesting. They make budget devices which are well specced and either ship with Cyanogen OS or stock Android pre-installed. It would be interesting to see these devices available outside of India, that’s for sure. Speaking of which, Micromax intends to start selling devices in the US soon it seems, at least according to the latest report.
