Emerging Markets

Can Rapid Adoption of Chinese Smartphones in India Continue as Political Tension Grows?

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 00:30:59 +0000

Can Rapid Adoption of Chinese Smartphones in India Continue as Political Tension Grows?

By: Lisa Moshfegh, Product Marketing and Aman Bansal, Analyst

Anonymous Wed, 07/15/2020 - 17:30

2020-07-16

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App Insights

Emerging Markets

Over the past several years, Chinese smartphone manufacturers have invested heavily in the Indian market. Armed with sizable marketing budgets and quality devices at competitive prices, Chinese OEMs dominated new device sales. However, with newly escalating political tensions between the two countries, Chinese smartphone manufacturers suddenly find themselves facing a boycott of Chinese-made goods. With this potential disruption of Chinese OEM momentum, the door is reopening for Samsung to regain lost share, Apple to now grab a toe-hold with its more affordable iPhone SE 2, and for Indian manufactures to regroup against the swift momentum generated by Chinese manufacturers.

In this report, we’ll show the rapid rise of Chinese OEMs in India over the last few years and who could benefit from the next phase of Indian smartphone growth. Flurry Analytics, owned by Verizon Media, is a mobile app analytics provider with insights across 1 million mobile applications globally, with strong coverage in India. For this analysis, we studied shifts in new device activations across smartphone OEMs in India. Let’s first review OEM share by country of origin.

In the chart above, we categorize manufacturers by their countries of origin: China, India, and South Korea. South Korea’s share is almost entirely made up of Samsung devices. India has several local brands, with Micromax being the largest. China also has several brands, including Xiaomi, vivo and Oppo. We’ve bundled all other international manufacturers into the Other category, including Apple, Motorola, and Nokia, among several others. Note that Apple has a very small share of the smartphone market, as 97% of all smartphones in India are Android devices.

In 2016, 34% of all devices activated in India were Samsung devices, putting the South Korean OEM comfortably in the number one spot. India’s OEMs captured more than 25% of all new devices, and Chinese manufacturers controlled 29%. Over the next four years, however, Chinese manufacturers drove remarkable growth, capturing 66% of all new device activations by 2020. During this same period, Indian manufacturers’ share of new device activations plummeted to just 4%.

The smartphone market in India also grew significantly over this time period. Between 2016 and 2020, the number of new device activations increased by 1.4X. To put this in perspective, for a country the size of India this means that over 100 million new devices entered the market. Chinese OEM growth came from both attracting new, first-time smartphone users as well as taking share from Indian competition. Let’s now review how device activation shifted by manufacturer over the last four years.

The chart above shows the change in new device activations across manufacturers. We compare the share of new devices activated in 2016 versus 2020. Note that only Chinese OEMs saw an uptick in smartphone adoption. In 2016, India’s Micromax was the second most activated device, only behind Samsung. Since then, Micromax device activations have dropped by 15 percentage points. More than anything, this chart highlights the gains that Chinese manufacturers have made at the expense of Micromax and the other Indian manufacturers.

Samsung, meanwhile has remained steady. Although its new device activations have decreased by 11 percentage points over the past four years, Samsung continues to experience year-over-year growth – just not at the same rate as their Chinese competition. Samsung devices are generally priced higher than their Chinese peers, putting them in a more premium category. It appears Samsung’s brand has not only withstood the first wave of Chinese competition in India, but that it may also benefit from the current political climate.

As political tensions have increased between India and China, both the people of India and its government have found ways to express their disapproval. The growing social movement to boycott Chinese-made products continues to gain momentum among the people. And India’s government has banned 59 Chinese-developed mobile applications that they claim are a threat to the “sovereignty and security of India.” With India’s smartphone market far from saturated, this tension creates opportunities for Indian manufacturers, Samsung and Apple. We’ll continue to monitor smartphone adoption rates by manufacturer in India and keep you updated about any important developments.

Where The Developers Are: A Global Footprint of Innovation

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 15:59:47 +0000

Where The Developers Are: A Global Footprint of Innovation

By: James Kelm, Senior Director of Product Management at Flurry

Anonymous Fri, 11/18/2016 - 07:59

2016-11-18

China Report: Device and App Trends in the #1 Mobile Market

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 05:54:09 +0000

China Report: Device and App Trends in the #1 Mobile Market

By: Mary Ellen Gordon, PhD

Anonymous Tue, 03/31/2015 - 22:54

2013-06-23

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Smartphones and tablets have gone from being the latest gadgets for relatively affluent people in relatively affluent countries to ubiquitous devices in mainstream use in many countries around the world. In fact, as we reported in February of this year China surpassed the US to become the country with the largest installed base of connected devices as measured by Flurry Analytics. As we also reported, a second wave of countries around the world is now experiencing the type of growth mobile pioneer countries experienced previously. For example, the mobile markets in the BRIC countries are now all growing faster than the mobile markets in the U.S., U.K., and South Korea.

Knowing that the landscape is constantly shifting, we are beginning a series of blog posts reporting on the use of smartphones, tablets, and apps in particular countries and geographic regions around the world. Given China’s world-leading installed base and considering the China Joy conference (China’s largest digital conference) is this week we thought we would begin there.

In June of this year Flurry Analytics measured 261,333,271 active smartphones and tablets in China. That represented a whopping 24% of the entire worldwide connected device installed base measured by Flurry. The chart below documents the growth in the installed base. The left axis and blue line show China’s growth over the years. The right axis and red line show growth in the world as a whole (including China) a basis of comparison. As can be seen from the gap between the two lines growing through 2010 and much of 2011, growth in smartphones and tablets in China lagged the world as a whole through that period. But starting toward the end of 2011, the installed base in China began a period of exponential growth. During this period it surpassed the growth rate for the world as a whole, as shown by the blue line catching the red line in the graph. We expect China to maintain its leadership (in terms of active installed base) for the foreseeable future because device penetration rate is still relatively low and much opportunity remains, as we reported in a previous post.

Examining a random sample of 18,310 of the devices in our system in China that run iOS or Android apps revealed that Apple and Samsung are the top two device manufacturers, as they are most everywhere. China’s own Xiaomi was a strong third, with a 6% share of the market, ahead of HTC, Lenovo and a multitude of others. As we noted in a previous post, Xiaomi has been successful in accumulating a large number of active users for each device model it releases. Worldwide, only Apple, Amazon, and Samsung have more active users for each device model released.

It will be interesting to see if Xiaomi can continue to gain share in China – possibly by mopping up share from smaller manufacturers of Android devices – and also if they can begin making gains in other markets outside of China to become more of a global player. With rumors of a Xiaomi tablet circulating, we will also be watching to see if their entry into the tablet market will increase the use of Android tablets in China. Currently 21% of the iOS devices in our randomly drawn sample were tablets compared to only 4% of the Android devices.

In looking at how Chinese people use their connected devices we see similarities and differences compared to the rest of the world. As a general rule worldwide, games dominate time spent in apps measured by Flurry Analytics, and China is no exception. On average, Chinese owners of iOS devices spent 47% of their app in games. The percentage of app time devoted to games was even greater for Android at 56%.

Smartphones and tablets are not just about fun and games in China. Compared to iOS device owners elsewhere, the average time Chinese owners spend using Books, Newsstand, Utility, and Productivity apps is greater than the rest of the world (1.8x, 1.7x, 2.3x, and 2.1x respectively). On average Chinese owners of Android devices spend more than seven times as much time in Finance apps (7.4x) than Android owners elsewhere spend in Finance apps, but they also spend more time in Entertainment apps (1.7x).

It will be interesting to see how China now having leadership in terms of its installed base will impact the device and app markets elsewhere. Given Xiaomi’s success at building a large number of users for each model it releases, it might try to add further scale by expanding internationally – particularly to the other rapidly-growing BRIC markets where brand preferences are not already well-entrenched.