Samsung no longer second best in India's growing smartphone market, loses to Vivo

India is one of the world's biggest smartphone markets, with Samsung being its top selling smartphone brand for many years in a row, up until recently, when the number one spot was taken by Xiaomi in 2017. According to analytics firm Canalys, Samsung held a good grasp on the number two spot since then, until the first quarter of 2020, when it finally lost to another Chinese giant, Vivo.

Vivo, like Xiaomi, is well known to deliver impressive mid-range smartphones at budget prices, which is perfect for the exponentially-growing Indian market. Vivo also is a company that manages to innovate just enough as to also get attention and interest to their phones, instead of offering vanilla budget devices. A good example is the company's late 2019 flagship Vivo V17 Pro, the first dual pop-up camera phone, which costs around $368 in India.

Now, as mentioned earlier, Vivo has surpassed Samsung in what is one of the most important markets for smartphone manufacturers, with Xiaomi holding the number one spot.

According to the data from Canalys, despite the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, in Q1 of 2020, smartphone sales in India have risen 12%, equating to 33.5 million units sold. The Chinese company Vivo grew its shipments by 50%, selling 6.7 million smartphones, while Samsung fell by 14%, selling 6.3 million smartphones.

The leading brand Xiaomi held 30.6% of the market and sold 10.3 million smartphones in the same quarter, while fourth and fifth place were held by two other Chinese giants, Shenzhen-based Realme and Oppo.


We recently reported on Samsung donating $2.64 million to the Union and State governments in India, with an additional $658,000 donation planned for the states of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, which contain about 272 million people, close to 2,000 of whom are reportedly infected by COVID-19. The South Korean company further donated to India efforts with $1.97 million for the country's PM Cares Fund, established to deal with the current and potential future pandemics, with the Indian Prime Minister serving as Chairman.