For 1st Time, Chinese Smartphones Push Indian Firms Out of Top 5

New Delhi: For the first time, no Indian manufacturer is in the top 5 firms in the smartphone market.

The list is dominated by Samsung and Chinese companies, which have crowded out the likes of Micromax, Intex and Lava.

Chinese firms have consolidated their position in the top 5. The last three months of 2016 saw them corner nearly half of the Indian smartphone market. Samsung retains the top spot with a fourth of the market share, followed by Chinese firms Xiaomi (10.7%), Lenovo (9.9%), Oppo (8.6%) and Vivo (7.6%).

Micromax and other Indian companies have seen their market share plunge as a result of taking the wrong decisions in a fast changing tech market.

“Wrong calls made by Indian smartphone companies are to blame for them losing their hold on the Indian market,” Jaipal Singh, an analyst tracking the mobile phone market in India for International Data Corporation, a market intelligence and advisory firm, told News18.

style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 20px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 32px; vertical-align: baseline;">Indian firms stuck with 3G in 2016 when the market decisively shifted to 4g and devices that supported it, leaving them high and dry.

Make in India, the scheme of the Indian government to promote manufacturing in India has been of no help to domestic firms, as illustrated by the dominance of Samsung and Chinese vendors in the smartphone segment.

Singh said that China provides a lot of support for its firms, mainly in the form of subsidies. “There is no such support in India,” he said.

There is more trouble for Indian manufacturers. India is one of the few markets where feature phones are the dominant category in the total mobile phone market. These have been a bastion of the home grown companies.

But now Chinese firms have entered this high volume segment as well. China’s Transsion group has already climbed to second spot with their ‘itel’ brand. Samsung remains top spot in this segment while numbers three to five are still held by Indian companies.