Brendan James: takeaways from the east, May 2018

The fall gets steeper in China, while featurephones gain a larger foothold in India. Canalys reports that smartphone shipments in the Chinese market declined by a whopping 21% for Q1 2018, shipping below 100 million units for the first time since 2013. Xiaomi was the only manufacturer to post notable growth in the quarter, expanding 37%. Huawei posted a growth rate of 2%, while Oppo and Vivo shrunk. Xiaomi could owe this bear-market success to their concentration on the low-end smartphone market; according to Canalys’ Hattie He, they are the only one of the major Chinese firms focused on it.

Year-on-year, meanwhile, Samsung continues to feel the squeeze as the usual homegrown suspects slowly push them out. In Q1 2018, the South Korean smartphone giant accounted for 27% of the market, compared to 42% in the same quarter last year. The notion that the firm specializing in the cheapest phones is also the one growing the strongest is taken to a logical extreme in India. Counterpoint Research reveals that Q1 not only saw the smartphone market flatline in the country, but their featurephone market take off.

Featurephones, not to be mistaken for “dumb-phones,” are simple devices that can provide functions like broadband web-browsing and gaming, but are not developed to handle the intensive apps that a smartphone would have. This growth was lead by the launch of the JioPhone, launched last summer. Mumbai-based Jio, who was a non-factor in last year’s Q1 reports, claimed 36% of the market, whereas Samsung’s share of featurephones dropped sharply. Also of note is the fact that Nokia – featured in the previous edition of the Handelot Times – claimed a 7.3% share of the market where they also had no presence the previous year.

The big news for Indian smartphone shipments is that Xiaomi has a record 31% of the market there, a record. Along with Honor and OnePlus, they were the one of the fastest growing brands in Q1.