Canalys has released a research report this Friday. In it, the market research company says that due to the impact of the current epidemic of the new coronavirus, India’s smartphone shipments in the second quarter fell by 48% year-on-year. Thus, it sets a record for India – this is the smartphone market’s largest single-quarter decline in a decade. In the second quarter, Chinese branded smartphones had nearly 80% market share in India. And Chinese brands accounted for three seats in the top four rankings. They are Xiaomi, VIVO, and OPPO, ranking first, second, and fourth.
Indian smartphone market in the second quarter
According to the research company, smartphone shipments in the Indian market in the second quarter of 2020 are approximately 17.3 million units. This is much lower than the 33 million units in the second quarter of 2019 and 33.5 million units in the first quarter of 2020.
The reason for this decline is mainly due to the current new coronavirus epidemic. As of now, more than 1 million cases of new coronavirus infection have been diagnosed in India.
In order to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, India ordered a nationwide lockdown at the end of March. It also required all stores across the country to temporarily suspend operations except for some stores selling groceries and medicines. Even e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Flipkart have been banned from selling smartphones and other products classified as ‘non-essential’ by the government.
The long-term lockdown lasted until mid-May, and after that, the Indian government believed that the delivery services of other stores and e-commerce items could resume operations in most parts of India. Judging from the strictness of the Indian government’s blockade order, we can understand why the smartphone market in India has declined so severely in the second quarter.
Chinese smartphone market in the second quarter
In contrast, as the world’s largest smartphone market, China’s smartphone shipments fell by only 18% year-on-year in the first quarter. The first quarter of this year was the period most severely affected by the new coronavirus epidemic in China. In the first quarter, when India was largely unaffected by the virus, Indian smartphone shipments increased by 4% year-on-year. In the first quarter, global smartphone shipments fell by 13%. Global smartphone shipments are expected to decline by 12% this year.
Overall changes
‘It’s been a rocky road to recovery for the smartphone market in India,” said Canalys Analyst Madhumita Chaudhary. “While vendors witnessed a crest in sales as soon as markets opened, production facilities struggled with staffing shortages on top of new regulations around manufacturing, resulting in lower production output. The fluidity of the lockdown situation across India has had a deep-rooted effect on vendors’ go-to-market strategies. Xiaomi and Vivo have undertaken an O2O (offline-to-online) strategy to support their massive offline network. Online channels, too, while seeing a positive effect of the pandemic on market share, have seen sales decline considerably.’
Despite the anti-epidemic lockdown order, Xiaomi still maintains a dominant position in the Indian smartphone market. According to Canalys estimates, Xiaomi has been the largest smartphone seller in India since the end of 2018. As of the second quarter of this year in June, Xiaomi shipped 5.3 million smartphones in the Indian market, occupying the 30.9%share of Indian smartphones.
In the second quarter, VIVO shipped 3.7 million units in India, with a 21.3% market share of Indian smartphones. It ranked second in the local smartphone sales rankings. South Korea’s Samsung Electronics was once the ruler of the Indian smartphone market. But its market share was only 16.8% in the second quarter, ranking third. However, Samsung Electronics has been expanding the Indian market. In recent months, the company has invested heavily in India. In the second quarter, OPPO ranked fourth.
Also Read: Samsung leads Indian high-end smartphone market
In recent weeks, almost every smartphone seller has launched new smartphone products in India. By this, they were hoping to recover from the downtime of the epidemic as soon as possible. It is expected that in the next month, various smartphone vendors will launch more new products.
Terry Ts 
Rudhra Nandu