China is still the world’s largest smartphone market, and that’s not about to change anytime soon. Smartphone sales in China might be declining, but this market is still a long way ahead. That being said, India is actually the second largest smartphone market, and it is growing really fast. Tons of companies have started selling their devices in India in the last year or two, and there are quite a few reasons for that. India is perceived as an untapped source of consumers, and that is true to an extent. Thanks to India’s ‘Make in India‘ initiative, various manufacturers actually started manufacturing devices in India, considering the fact that this program provides various incentives for in-country manufacturing.
Now, speaking of the Indian smartphone market, some analysts (like Canalys) are claiming that Lenovo-Motorola is actually the third-placed smartphone manufacturer in India. Well, Intex says that’s not the case, this India-based company is claiming they’re still third-placed manufacturer in the country. Canalys said last week that Lenovo and Motorola (combined) managed to ship 3 million units in India, which means their shipments were up almost 60% YoY. Now, if this info is true, they’ve managed to jump over Intex and claim that third place. Intex, however, disagrees with that, this is what Sanjay Kalirona had to say, Intex’s Mobile Business Head: “As per our internal reports and import data that we study on a monthly basis, we don’t see that their numbers were higher than us”.
While Lenovo-Motorola and Intex dispute over who’s third-placed in the country, Samsung and Micromax are well ahead. Canalys said that Samsung managed to extend their lead, and Micromax didn’t do all that well. According to the analyst firm, Micromax’s shipments actually fell 20% due to inventory buildup. Samsung is doing really, really well in India, while they’ve dropped out of top 5 smartphone manufacturers in China, for example. Samsung was once one of the biggest OEMs in China, but in the last 1-2 years, the company is not doing all that well. Chinese smartphone market actually had a huge impact on Samsung’s overall sales number, and it will certainly going to be interesting to see if Samsung can get back on the right path in China.