When IDC, Strategy Analytics, and Canalys published their Q2 2018 global smartphone shipment numbers, all their findings were in sync in spite of minor differences in data. When it comes to the Indian market, however, the figures from IDC tell an entirely different story from that of Canalys and Counterpoint Research.
Both Canalys and Counterpoint Research showed considerable gains for Samsung in the second quarter of this year. While Canalys said that Samsung almost beat Xiaomi to take back the crown, the numbers from Counterpoint Research put Samsung ahead of Xiaomi in the Indian smartphone market. Contradicting both these reports, IDC India’s Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker puts Xiaomi comfortably at the top of the Indian smartphone market in Q2 2018.
Samsung placed second
According to the IDC data, Indian smartphone market grew at a healthy 19.8% year-on-year to 33.5 million units. IDC credits this growth to the launch of many online-exclusive models and a strong performance by offline-focused smartphone vendors. Online shipments increased by 44% year-on-year and accounted for 36% of the smartphone market.
Xiaomi stood at the top of the table in Q2 2018 with 10 million shipments and 29.7% market share, up from 4.8 million units and 17.2% market share in Q2 last year. Samsung also increased its year-on-year shipments from 6.6 million units to 8 million units, but still fell short of Xiaomi’s numbers and settled for the second place with 23.9% market share.
Vivo and Oppo occupied the next two places while a relatively unknown company Transsion (owns offline-focused Tecno and online-exclusive Infinix brands) occupied the fifth spot. Together, the top five vendors accounted for 79% of all the smartphone shipments in the quarter.
This kind of contradictory findings goes on to show why numbers from these market research firms shouldn’t be taken at face value. While minor variances in data between different reports are understandable, such polar-opposite findings suggest that either one or all of them got their shipment data wrong.
