The International Data Corporation (IDC) has just released some Q2 2017 market info for the Indian market. IDC says that 28 million handsets were shipped to India in the second quarter, which means that the Indian smartphone market grew 3.7 percent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ), while it grew 1.6 percent year-on-year (YoY). This is not exactly a terribly significant growth, but the most important thing for India is that it started to recover from the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) which was introduced in the country at the end of last year.
Now, as far as smartphone manufacturers are concerned, Samsung has actually managed to retain the lead in India. The Korea-based tech giant is still far ahead of its competition, as it managed to grab a 24 percent market share at the end of Q2 this year. Xiaomi is the second-placed company, according to IDC, as it managed to grab a 17 percent share. Xiaomi is followed by Vivo, a company which held a 13 percent share at the end of Q2, while OPPO and Lenovo managed to grab 8 percent and 7 percent, respectively. If you do some math, you will be able to find out that 31 percent of the market is left for all the other smartphone manufacturers which are active in the country. It is worth saying that Lenovo actually includes both Motorola and ZUK’s sales, so we’re basically looking at three companies under the Lenovo brand.
Now, Xiaomi actually managed to triple its offline shipments in Q2 this year, as the company opened a number Mi Home and Mi authorized stores in the country. All of this resulted in a 25 percent QoQ growth for the company in the second quarter of this year. India is one of Xiaomi’s most important markets, so this is not all that surprising, and it will certainly be interesting to see if the company will be able to close the gap on Samsung by the end of the year. Vivo is also doing really well in India, while OPPO is expected to grow in the coming months as well. Indian smartphone market is expected to grow in the coming months, in general, as the impact of GST will, hopefully, not going to be that significant anymore, as the market is slowly, but surely, becoming more stable.