Reliance LYF tops India's handset market in January: CMR

According to a new report by research firm CMR, Reliance Retail's mobile handset brand, LYF topped the overall mobile handset leaderboard with 27 percent market share, followed by Samsung at a distant second with 12 percent share, and itel at third with 8 percent market share.

Prabhu Ram, Head - Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CMR said, "LYF has continued its phenomenal growth from 4Q 2017, beginning the new year on a high. These results underline the importance and dominance of feature phones market segment in India. If LYF is able to maintain its strong performance through the remainder of a quarter, we believe LYF is on course to take the top honors in 1Q 2018. This will end Samsung's continued reign as the market leader in the overall mobile handset market."

Prabhu further added, "On the other hand, for Samsung to continue maintaining its overall leadership, it would need to increase its shipments in the rest of 1Q 2018 by at least 25-30 percent. Going forward, Samsung should ramp up its strategy around the growing and increasingly exciting entry-level smartphone segment. Key areas of consideration for Samsung's strategy would include an introduction of 4G feature phones, joining AndroidGo, as well as handset bundling with telcos."

Meanwhile, the report said that feature phone handset brand shipments had a market share of 72 percent, while smartphone shipments ended with 28 percent. On a YoY basis, feature phones saw a growth of 116 percent.

In 4Q 2017, the smartphone market recorded a 19 percent sequential decline while the featurephone market saw a 36 percent sequential growth, and Y-O-Y growth of 62 percent.

Furthermore report pointed out that in January 2018, the smartphone leaderboard continued to be dominated by Xiaomi with 27 percent market share, while Samsung had a 25 percent market share, with Lava at third with 8 percent market share. On the feature phone leaderboard for January, the top three brands were LYF (37.3 percent), itel (11 percent) and Samsung (7 percent).

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"One interesting trend that has emerged is the decline of Oppo. In January 2017, Oppo was one of the top four smartphone brands in India with 9 percent market share. This January, it has moved out of the smartphone leaderboard, ending with a market share of only 4 percent." Narinder Kumar, Analyst, CMR-IIG.