The industry is back!
All in all, smartphone shipments went down in India last year by 2 percent compared to the year before that, which is actually a pretty good result if you consider the market registered a decline for five consecutive quarters… prior to Q4 2023.
Sales were amazingly up by no less than 20 percent in the final three months of last year (versus the same period of 2022), and all of the top four vendors crucially contributed to that large and somewhat unexpected growth. Samsung jumped 14 percent year-on-year to retain its holiday crown, edging out Xiaomi, which actually posted an even more impressive surge of 31 percent.
In third place, Vivo didn’t exactly set the nation on fire with its fairly modest 10 percent growth, while Realme absolutely exploded from 2.7 to 4.5 million unit shipments to keep Oppo at bay. Going forward, India’s “stellar” smartphone market is expected to continue growing, although probably not at the same pace as in Q4 2023. But the local industry is certainly bouncing back after a period of struggles, and in addition to these leading Android smartphone brands, that’s also thanks to Apple.
Premium phones are the bomb!
Canalys is not ready to share that segment’s full and detailed numbers for either Q4 or 2023 as a whole, but premium smartphones are projected to continue growing in popularity in India, thus helping Apple and Samsung (but also other brands) to keep their profit margins nice and chunky.
