Xiaomi likely to lose top spot in Indian smartphone markets

New Delhi : The Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is confident of maintaining the number one position in Indian smartphone market, but the industry experts believe that it will be hard for the company to maintain their place in 2020.

At the end of the first quarter of 2019, Xiaomi had a market share of 30.6%, far ahead of Samsung, which took the second spot with a share of 22.3%, according to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report.

But by the third quarter of 2019, Xiaomi's market share fell to 27.1%. Samsung too experienced a decline as its share went down to 18.9%, IDC data showed.

"Given the remarkable Q3 2019 strides made by the BBK (parent company of OPPO, Vivo, Realme and OnePlus) brands in India, Xiaomi would need to be wary of the rising competition and the decline in its market share. In the first three quarters of 2019, Xiaomi lost 3% market share," Live Mint quoted Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CyberMedia Research (CMR).

Meanwhile, the Realme market share has grown significantly from 6% to 14.3%. Vivo also witnessed its fair share of growth this year. Its share rose from 13% in Q1 to 15.2% in Q3. OPPO did even better than Vivo in terms of growth. OPPO's share grew from 7.6% in Q1 to 11.8% in Q3, according to IDC.

According to the experts, the 49% of the sale of smartphones in 2020 will be from the segment ( ₹5,001 to ₹10,000) where Xiaomi is still strong. "The other major chunk is mid-segment ( ₹10,001 to ₹25,000). Here we have increasingly good number of strong players emerging like Realme, OPPO and Vivo. This segment will sell 44% of smartphones," Kawoosa said.