Xiaomi may have won the race of becoming the top brand in the Indian smartphone market and has failed to enamour its arch rival Samsung.
The South Korean smartphone brand which lost its position to the Chinese rival, Xiaomi in 2017 claimed that it has stepped aside from the rats race on paper and is focusing more on value for them which means increasing revenues.
“We focus on actual sales and not shipments. By increasing shipments, any brand can become number one on paper. But the real question is how many of these shipments are actually getting converted into real sales? We have always considered real sales figure and as per Gfk we are number one since 2012,” said Asim Warsi, Senior Vice President, Mobil Business, Samsung India.
According the IDC’s Asia-Pacific Quaterly Mobile Treacker, May 2019, Xiaomi currently tops the Indian smartphone market followed by Samsung ,Vivo, Oppo and Realme. According to the report, Samsung winessed a fall of 4.8% over the earlier year in unit deals. While Xiaomi kept up its initiative position, developing by 8.1% year-on-year in first quarter of 2019. There were numerous new dispatches by Xiaomi, to be specific the Redmi Note 7 arrangement alongside Redmi Go.
Upbeat on online prospects, Samsung estimated its entire online smartphone business to be roughly worth around $6 billion in India in 2019 out of which around the company made $4.5 billion through online consumer sales with the remaining $1.5 billion through bulk retail sales of shop-keepers who bought smartphones from e-commerce platforms at discounted prices to be further sold.
Speaking of online sales, the online-only Galaxy M series is the key driver for Samsung. Sharing the success of the model Warsi said, “We have sold over 2 million devices in the Galaxy M series (M10, 20 and M30) within just four months till May. The Galaxy M20 is the highest selling out of the three M series phone.”
He also confirmed that Samsung has no plans to make the Galaxy M series available in retail stores. “The Galaxy M series will remain online-only and our next launch is the Galaxy M40,” added Warsi.
