With the increased popularity of solid smartphones made by the native vendors and their high end specifications despite being priced reasonably have garnered the attention of the consumers across the globe lately. Owing to the same, Samsung’s market shares have been dipping in several markets for the past few quarters leading drastic changes that were expected to happen.
Well, the South Korean firm has slipped in two rapidly progressing markets – India and China as the local vendors Micromax and Xiaomi have snatched the predominant position from Samsung in their respective markets and they have become toppers in mobile phone shipments in Q2 2014. In the Indian market, according to CounterPoint Research, Micromax accounts for 16.6% of the overall handset shipments in India and this followed by Samsung with a share of 14.4%. The third firm is Nokia with 10.9% share with Karbonn close on its heels holding a share of 9.5%. When comparing these figures of the Q2 with that of Q1 of this year, Samsung was the leader with a share of 16.3% and Micromax was trying to race it with 13% market share.
However, it has to be noted that this is the case of overall mobile phones and when it comes to smartphones, it is still Samsung that is leading all the other firms with a dominant share of 25.3% followed by Micromax at 19.1%. The other firms are not even close bagging only meager shares of 5.9% and lesser. This tips that the feature phone business is still doing well in India with numerous consumers opting for them and Samsung is completely not the preferred one in this segment.
The report also adds on that the Indian mobile phone market has witnessed a growth of 2% annually while the smartphone market grew by a massive 68%. Owing to all these progresses, Micromax has entered the 10th largest handset brand in the world for the previous quarter in terms of volume of mobile phone shipments. Coming to the Chinese market, Samsung is affected harder with the whopping growth of Xiaomi. The firm has outshined Samsung with a market share of 39% in the second quarter while Samsung has witnessed a great dip from 31% to a mere 12%, claims a Wall Street Journal report.
Xiaomi has managed to curb the sales of Samsung by launching quality devices with competitive price tags. In the smartphone market alone, Xiaomi has topped Samsung with 14% market share while that of Samsung is only 12% while that in Q1 was 18.3%. All of the above data is based on shipment recorded and that doesn’t necessarily mean units retailed. We will know for sure after IDC releases its retail statistics later this year.
