The stats for FY18 are sourced from Registrar of Companies filings. Oppo, Vivo, Huawei and Xiaomi emerge as biggest players in Smartphone sales in India
Indian smartphone consumers spent over Rs 50,000 crore on Chinese brands in FY18. The amount is nearly twice what consumers in India had spent on Chinese smartphones in FY17.
Major players
The list of major Chinese brands that make up for more than half of the total smartphones sold in India includes – Honor, Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, Infinix, Lenovo-Motorola and One-Plus. The combined sales figures of Honor, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo doubled to Rs 51,722 crore in FY18 from Rs 26,262 crore in FY17.
Xiaomi India, leading the charts posted a revenue of Rs 22,947.3 crore in FY18 while Oppo India’s revenue stood at Rs 11,994.3 crore in the FY18 fiscal. Vivo India’s revenue in FY18, was reported at Rs 11,179.3 crore and Huawei’s at Rs 5,601.3 crore (numbers sourced from Registrar of Companies filings).
It is also to be noted here that OnePlus is constantly maintaining lead in the Rs 30,000 plus premium segment smartphones from last two years. OnePlus, Vivo and Oppo work under the umbrella of BBK, China.
Opportunities in India
The growing love for Chinese smartphones in India is also resulting into some major opportunities in the field of creating jobs and local manufacturing abilities.
Xiaomi, had recently announced its plans of investing Rs 15,000 crore in smartphone component manufacturing while Oppo is already busy in establishing two new manufacturing facilities in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Vivo currently employs over 5,000 people in the country.
Samsung and Apple
In comparison to Chinese smartphone brands in India, US based Apple had reported sales worth Rs 13,097 crore in FY18. Samsung, the Korea based smartphone maker, on the other hand had posted sales of Rs 34,261 crore in FY17. The figures for Samsung sales in FY18 are not available yet.
Future
With Chinese smartphone brands aggressively launching cheaper handsets with premium features in India, their sales figures are bound to go up. Their marketing budgets also make up for a huge chunk of money they invest in advertising their products.
India’s love for Chinese smartphones may just be hard to tame in the near future.
