Samsung India’s smartphone business is still booming despite an extremely high level of competition, with the company reporting a 27 percent revenue growth in the last fiscal year which ended March 2017. The firm’s turnover now amounts to approximately $5.3 billion and is projected to continue rising going forward, albeit some industry watchers remain skeptical about Samsung managing to maintain such momentum in its entirety. Over the same period, Samsung’s operations in the South Asian country grew by 20 percent in total, with its other divisions mostly improving their performance but not at the same rate of the mobile unit which accounts for around 60 percent of its local business.
The Galaxy Note 7 debacle from last fall didn’t lead to any direct losses in India as the faulty phablet was flagged for a global recall even before being commercialized in the country. However, the lack of a new flagship offering in late 2016 is widely believed to have limited Samsung’s performance as even though its high-end devices aren’t its top sellers in India, they still come with much bigger profit margins than the ones associated with mid-range and entry-level products. While Samsung remains one of the fastest-growing original equipment manufacturers in India and is still estimated to be leading the market, Xiaomi is not just extremely close to its current shipment figures but has also been experiencing a staggering surge in recent times, having expanded its business by 700 percent last year. Three years after entering the market, Xiaomi is close to overtaking Samsung as the largest smartphone vendor in India by both shipment and sales and will be able to do so as soon as next year, according to most industry trackers.
The highly competitive nature of the Indian market is a result of the overall state of the country which is now experiencing a smartphone adoption wave comparable to the one seen in the West a decade ago. Due to that trend, OEMs are fighting both for tens of millions of first-time smartphone buyers and consumers who still aren’t showing any signs of upgrade fatigue, having been partially responsible for turning India into the world’s second largest handset market in the world.