Xiaomi, Vivo, and Realme are all outpacing the champion
What’s likely to cause even more concern in Samsung’s camp is the great progress reported by Xiaomi, Vivo, and Realme in their Indian sales figures between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024. We’re talking big jumps of 29, 14, and 17 percent respectively, which make Samsung’s own decent year-on-year progress of 6 percent look pretty humble.
Of course, Realme is still only the country’s fifth-largest vendor, which means it’s not exactly in a position to threaten Samsung’s dominant status anytime soon. But Xiaomi and Vivo are just one percent behind India’s champion in market share, and if their growth rate stays the same in the next couple of quarters, 2024 could well wrap up with a new regional gold medalist.
Xiaomi’s “resurgence”, meanwhile, was apparently fueled primarily by low to mid-end models like the Redmi 13C 5G and Redmi Note 13 5G, so at least from a profit margin standpoint, Samsung is clearly still holding a massive advantage over its rivals.
Apple and Motorola are also getting big in India
Another American company surging in India is Motorola, but it remains to be seen if the vendor top five will be disrupted anytime soon by these two rapidly growing brands or a third one that may not sound familiar to a lot of our readers in the Western Hemisphere: Infinix.
In fourth place, Oppo (excluding OnePlus) actually reported a drop in sales between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024 after reducing the number of new releases in the “mid-high price ranges”, which evidently proved to be a not-so-successful strategy.
