Although China has been the biggest smartphone market for a long time, the United States has remained in the second spot over the years. However, in a recent report, Counterpoint Research claimed that India has surpassed the United States to become the second largest smartphone market.
According to the report, smartphone manufacturers shipped over 158 million smartphones in the Indian market during 2019. If you are familiar with the market, this claim shouldn’t really come off as a major surprise. Most of the smartphone manufacturers are known for their affordable offerings in the region. For instance, over 72 percent of the smartphones were made by smartphone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Vivo, Realme and Oppo.
Additionally, the report revealed that the while the Chinese smartphone manufacturers expanded their reach in the Indian market significantly, other non-Chinese brands fared pretty well. For example, although Xiaomi has been releasing several high-end devices in the Chinese market, India is now the biggest market for the smartphone manufacturer. On the other hand, premium smartphone manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung are offering several affordable smartphones to the consumers in the market. Despite that, Samsung saw a five percent decline in the market in 2019 while Apple grew its market share in India during the time period. As for other Chinese smartphone makers, Realme saw a 255 percent growth in 2019 and Vivo grew an estimated 76 percent during 2019.
It’s not particularly surprising to see Indian market attracting a lot of smartphone manufacturers’ attention over last couple of years. Due to the massive population of the country, smartphone makers are keeping people of the emerging market in mind when designing new smartphone. As a result, it’ll be interesting to see how Indian smartphone market continues to grow over next couple of years.
