India feature phone market doubled in Q1 2018 due to strong shipments of JioPhone

India's overall mobile phone shipments grew 48 percent YoY in Q1 2018 as the market was driven by the feature phone segment which doubled in Q1 2018 due to strong shipments of Reliance JioPhone, according to a new report by research firm Counterpoint.

Tarun Pathak, Associate Director, commenting on the surprising growth of feature phones, added, "The demand for JioPhone continued through Q1 2018 as Reliance Jio's feature phone market share raced from 0 percent last year to 36 percent in Q1 2018. This demand was catalyzed by the introduction of a cheaper data plan, for the JioPhone in January: Rs 49 per month including unlimited voice calling and 1GB of data per month."

He said, "Jio has been aggressively promoting JioPhone as "India's free smartphone" though technically, a smart feature phone to attract the large base of 2G voice users which prefer the simpler feature phone form-factor."

While in the smartphone segment, Xiaomi maintained its lead in Q1 2018 with a record 31 percent market share followed by Samsung (26 percent), Vivo (6 percent), OPPO (6 percent), and Honor (3 percent).

Karn Chauhan, Research Analyst stated "Q1 2018 started off with some brands sitting on inventory post the festive season in Q4 2017, which continued throughout the quarter as industry moves to a full view display portfolio. Furthermore, the quarter was also marked with less than normal smartphone launches as very few brands refreshed their portfolio, except for Xiaomi and Samsung which benefitted from the new launches. However, we expect the demand to start picking up from early Q2 2018 onwards, driven by faster replacement rate of existing 2G and 3G smartphone users upgrading to 4G mobile phones.

Huawei's Honor brand captured the fifth position for the first time ever, in the Indian smartphone market due to the strong performance of Honor 9 Lite and Honor 7X across online channels.

Commenting on the competitive landscape, Anshika Jain, Research Analyst said, "Xiaomi and Samsung alone captured 58 percent of the total smartphone market. Xiaomi's performance is driven by rising product-pull in the offline market, building upon its strong presence in the online channel where it captured a record 57 percent share."

China-based Transsion Group (the holding group of Tecno, Itel, and Infinix) has become the fifth largest player with 4 percent market share in Q1 2018 (combined for all three brands). Tecno, which debuted in April last year, has emerged as a leading smartphone brand and is close to entering the top ten list. The brand grew 23 percent QoQ in Q1 2018.

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Furthermore, a report said that the race for the fifth position is quite close between Lava, Micromax, Honor, Nokia (HMD) and Lenovo (+Moto) brands. Adding to that Honor (146 percent), Xiaomi (134 percent) and OnePlus (112 percent) were the fastest growing smartphone brands in Q1 2018.