Phone sales up 26% in festive season

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The overall India festive season smartphone sales registered highest ever growth of 26 per cent year on year in 2018 with online channels accounting for almost half of the total sales. According to Counterpoint Research, this was mainly driven by the leading two e- commerce platforms’ series of online sale events — ‘ Flipkart Big Billion Day’ and ‘ Amazon Great Indian Festival’.

Additionally huge discounts offered on Xiaomi through Mi. com and nocost EMI on debit and credit cards on top smartphones along with attractive offers also helped in boosting demand.

“The online sale events which continued for weeks running up to Diwali helped these online platforms register a massive 46 per cent YoY growth in sales volumes and contributed to half of the overall sales. This was mainly due to greater number of attractive exclusive smartphones as compared to the last year on these platforms, backed up with offers and lucrative deals. Flipkart stood out due to the most number of exclusives while Amazon benefited from the launch of OnePlus 6T,” said Karn Chauhan, research analyst at Counterpoint, market research firm.

According to it just three brands captured 57 per cent of the overall Diwali festive season smartphone sales. Xiaomi topped the chart accounting ■ with 43 per cent of the online sales and 29 per cent of the total sales between October 9 and November 8, 2018. It widened the gap with Samsung which still did relatively well in offline channels capturing 30 per cent share.

The newly- launched online only smartphone brand, Realme, had a record festive performance for any new brand ever in India. Realme immediately captured 9 per cent share jumping to the third spot in overall sales volume performance and also became the second largest in online segment with 18 per cent share.

Huawei too had a strong performance in online segment while Vivo performed exceedingly well in offline channels.

Emerging brands such as OnePlus, Pocophone, Asus and HMD Nokia also registered strong uptake during the festive season due to the new launches ahead of the festive sale period, it said.