Samsung performed exceedingly well in offline channel sales whereas Xiaomi and Realme dominated smartphone sales in the online channel
Xiaomi, Realme and Samsung captured 57 per cent market share of total smartphones sold during the Diwali Season in India. The latest CounterPoint Research report also claims that smartphone sales grew 26 per cent in comparison to last year’s sales figures.
Counterpoint Research has accredited this growth in sales, largely to online smartphone sales, brand promotions and availability of discounts and no-cost EMIs on credit as well as debit cards.
Karn Chauhan, research analyst, Counterpoint Research said, “The overall India festive season smartphone sales registered highest ever growth of 26 per cent YoY in 2018. However, the online sale events which continued for weeks running up to Diwali helped these online platforms register a massive 46% YoY growth in sales volumes and contributed to half of the overall sales. This was mainly due to greater number of attractive exclusive smartphones as compared to the last year on these platforms, backed up with offers and lucrative deals. Flipkart stood out due to the most number of exclusives while Amazon benefited some from the launch of OnePlus 6T.”
Smartphone sales shares
Tarun Pathak, associate director, Counterpoint Research, said, “The top three smartphone brands, Xiaomi, Samsung and Realme captured 57% of the overall Diwali festive season smartphone sales.”
Xiaomi, with 29 per cent smartphones sales, leads the chart among the three. It also lead the category in online sales with 43 per cent share. When compared to online sales figures, Xiaomi was only able to capture 14 per cent share through offline sales channels. However, the brand recently announced 500 Mi stores in Rural India, a move that might help the brand strengthen its offline sales channel in the country.
Pathak said, “Xiaomi sold the most number of smartphones during this period thanks to strong performance in online channels. Xiaomi widened the gap with Samsung which still did relatively well in offline channels capturing 30 per cent share.”
Samsung on the other hand, was able to capture 19 per cent share of the total smartphones sold during the festive Diwali period. Samsung also lead the category of smartphone sales made through offline channels. It held 30 per cent share of all smartphone sales made through offline channels during the period.
The most interesting finding of the study points towards smartphones brand Realme. Though the brand might not have created waves in the offline channel smartphone sales but it was still able to capture 9 per cent share of the total smartphones sold during the period.
Pathak continued, “The newly launched online only smartphone brand, Realme had a record festive performance for any new brand ever in India. Realme immediately captured 9 per cent share jumping to the third spot in overall sales volume performance and also became the second largest in online segment with 18% share.
Other smartphone brands performance during Diwali
Smartphone brands such as Huawei, Nokia, OnePlus and Vivo also performed well during the Diwali sales period. Pathak specifically stated in the report that while Huawei made a strong performance in the online sales, Vivo also performed well in offline channel sales.
Hanish Bhatia, Counterpoint’s senior analyst, said, “Emerging brands such as OnePlus, Pocophone, Asus and HMD Nokia also registered strong uptake during the festive season due to the new launches ahead of the festive sale period. Meanwhile, Apple’s new iPhones had a relatively lukewarm response for its new and older iPhone models compared to the rest of the brands.”
