In the second quarter of this year, Chinese smartphone brands had nearly 80% market share in India, according to a report released on Friday by market research firm Canalys.
Three of the top four sellers were Chinese brands, with Xiaomi being No. 1, Vivo No. 2, and OPPO No. 4, the report showed.
Xiaomi has been the largest seller of smartphones in India since late 2018. According to Canalys, in the second quarter of this year, Xiaomi shipped 5.3 million smartphones in India, representing a 30.9 percent share of smartphone sales in India.
Vivo shipped 3.7 million units in India in the second quarter, accounting for 21.3 percent of the market share and putting it in second place.
South Korea's Samsung Electronics, once the dominant player in the Indian smartphone market, had a 16.8 percent market share in the second quarter and came in third in the sales chart.
However, Samsung has been expanding in the Indian market and in recent months the company has made another major investment in the country.
In the second quarter, fourth in the sales chart was OPPO.
Canalys says Apple has just 1 percent of the smartphone market share in India, and the company is the least affected by the Covid-19 outbreak among the top 10 smartphone makers in the country.
According to Canalys, Apple shipped 250,000 iPhone units in the second quarter of 2020, a year-on-year decline of 20%.
Overall, smartphone shipments in India fell 48 percent year on year in the second quarter due to the impact of the novel coronavirus outbreak, the largest single quarterly decline in the Indian smartphone market in a decade, the report said.
About 17.3 million smartphones were shipped in India in the second quarter of 2020, well below the 33 million units in Q2 2019 and 33.5 million in Q1 2020.
This decline is largely attributed to the current epidemic, with the number of new coronavirus infections reported in India to date has been more than 1 million cases.
In an effort to contain the spread of the virus, India ordered a nationwide lockdown at the end of March.
Even e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Flipkart have been banned from selling smartphones and other products classified as "non-essential".
In the first quarter, when India was still largely unaffected by the coronavirus epidemic, smartphone shipments in the country grew by 4%. Worldwide smartphone shipments declined by 13 percent during that period.
“It’s been a rocky road to recovery for the smartphone market in India,” said Madhumita Chaudhary, an analyst at Canalys.
While vendors witnessed a crest in sales as soon as markets opened, production facilities struggled with staffing shortages on top of new regulations around manufacturing, resulting in lower production output, Chaudhary said.
