Xiaomi was ruling the smartphone industry for five years in India with Samsung being in second position. Both the smartphone brands gave tough competition to each other and launched high-tech devices keeping in mind the needs of customers. Still, Xiaomi has continued to dominate the smartphone industry for almost 20 quarters, but now the tables seemed to have taken a turn as Samsung has made a comeback in Q4 of 2022.
According to Canalys and Counterpoint, research Xiaomi has lost the top spot to Samsung in the smartphone sales charts in India. Not only this, Xiaomi even degraded to the third position according to the sales chart with Vivo being at number two.
According to Canalys research, India’s smartphone shipments fell to 151.6 million units in 2022. In comparison to 2021, the smartphone industry witnessed a decline of 6% in 2022. Samsung has reportedly sold 6.7 million units for a market share of 21 percent whereas Vivo managed to sell 6.4 million units for a share of 20 percent and has taken the second spot.
The Chinese smartphone brand, Xiaomi took the third position by shipping 5.5 million units. The downfall of Xiaomi from the top position to the third position is definitely bad news for the brand. Apart from this OPPO and Realme remained in fourth and fifth positions respectively.
Looking at this report, it appears that Xiaomi focused more on selling phones under Rs.10000, but the consumers were definitely ready to pay more for eye catchy smartphones with advanced features. Samsung definitely seems to understand this and launched smartphones to meet the needs of the consumers and also offered financing schemes for their devices which made them quite affordable.
This step by Samsung has definitely helped the brand to bounce back to the number one position and take its crown back from Xiaomi. Also as per Canalys analyst, vendors that were mostly focused on online channels suffered from poor e-commerce festive sales performance in Q4 2022. He said, “ Xiaomi aimed to clear out inventory of its older models using an e-commerce channel. But due to poor e-commerce festive sales performance, Xiaomi and Realme saw significant stockpiling of their products in online channels in Q4 2022 .”
These reports have definitely shown that brands that do not keep in mind the preferences of consumers and changing market conditions are most likely to face consequences similar to what happened to Xiaomi.
