International Data Corporation (IDC) is out with its annual search for smartphone shipments in India. The total number of smartphones shipments amounted to around 109.1 million units while for the fourth quarter of 2016, the shipments figures recorded at 25.8 million units. This makes up for a 5.2 percent of year on year growth from 2015 while the quarterly figures suffered a 20.3 percent of decline when compared to Q3 2016. The primary reason for the decline, as noted by IDC, is demonetization which took place in the month of November.
Feature phones still remained dominant in overall mobile shipments with an annual decline of just 9.4 percent as compared to 16.2 percent decline in the year 2015. In terms of smartphone vendors, Chinese manufacturers continued to grow to pose a greater threat to homegrown vendors by tapping feature phones. For Instance, Chinese handset manufacturer ‘itel’ entered the Indian feature phone market and already sits on the second spot. To put this in figures, Chinese handset manufacturers grabbed a massive 46 percent of market share while Indian firms struggled and further lost their share value by 19 percent. Moreover, IDC predicts that the trend is likely to continue in 2017 as well and Chinese smartphone manufacturers will give a tough time to Indian manufacturers in the feature phone race.
Meanwhile, online smartphone volume also saw jump by 10 percent with Xiaomi and Lenovo taking the lead in this segment amounting to more than half of total shipment volume done online.
>>Coming to the top five vendors in terms of smartphone shipments for Q4 2016, Samsung still notched the top spot with 25.1 percent of market share even after a pretty tough fourth quarter last year. While the annual shipment volume grew by 3.2 percent, the South Korean giant suffered a 13.1 percent of decline when compared to Q3 2016.
>>Surprisingly, Xiaomi managed to climb up to 2nd spot this time around with 10.7 percent of market share translating into a 15.3 percent quarter-on-quarter growth. On the other hand, Lenovo grabbed the second spot if we take the whole of 2016 in consideration recording an annual growth of 14.8 percent and 8.9 percent market share.
>>Further, Lenovo took the third spot when only Q4 2016 is considered despite it witnessing a quarter-on-quarter growth of 17.4 percent. The Chinese handset manufacturer had 9.9 percent of market share. On the other hand, if annual figures are spotted, Micromax had the third spot with 8.8 percent of market share and a significant annual decline of 37.9 percent.
>>For the fourth spot, we had OPPO with about 8.6 percent of market share in Q4 2016 along with a 29.9 percent of growth when compared to Q3 2016. Whereas, Reliance Jio made a surprising entry at the fourth spot for the whole 2016 with 7.1 percent of market share and 2122.7 percent of annual growth. Note that, Reliance Jio didn’t existed in 2015 so the annual growth naturally appears to be gigantic.
>>Lastly, Vivo which is still considered one of the top brands in offline market stood at fourth spot with 7.6 percent of market share in Q4 2016 and over 50 percent of quarter-on-quarter growth. On the other hand, Xiaomi (2nd in Q4) stood fifth for the whole year 2016 with 6.6 percent of market share and an annual growth of 119.4 percent.