Across the world, the biggest smartphone manufacturers are Apple (28%), Samsung (24%), Xiaomi (12%), Oppo (6%) and Vivo (5%). However, there are geographic patterns in popularity, with Apple dominating North America and East Asia, while Samsung leads in South America, Europe, Africa and West Asia in addition to its home turf of South Korea. Xiaomi is the most popular phone brand across South Asia, Spain, Venezuela, Ukraine, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine, while Tecno is popular in West and Central Africa. Oppo, Vivo and Huawei lead in Indonesia, Bhutan and Togo respectively.
Does anyone know if the Indian government’s asset freeze on Xiaomi, and its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war, have affected sales there?
India has not frozen Xiaomi’s assets as far as I know. They got a pretty big fine for tax evasion (they said they were paying the tax in China, but weren’t, or something like that).All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, Realme, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn’t really matter. Now these companies are challenging Xiaomi, but they’re doing it by offering comparable performance to price ratio and better cameras. Also, Xiaomi has conceded to our demand to set up some local manufacturing. Low-end phones are now assembled in Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida, although the components are still imported.
Edit: First sentence is incorrect, as pointed out below.
$676 million of assets were frozen by the Indian government in 2022 and Indian courts rejected an appeal by Xiaomi in 2023.
Vivo was subjected to an asset freeze in the same year and Oppo was also investigated. As far as I know, the Indian government is still putting pressure on Chinese smartphone manufacturers in 2024.
Oh right, some of their assets were frozen, due to non-payment of tax. I thought you meant freezing all assets and kicking them out of the country, like what happened to Huawei.
To some extent, these might be routine tax evasion investigations. But there is definitely a pattern of certain Indian companies getting favourable treatment over foreign competitors. Whether this is a deliberate move, or just politicians shaking up businesses for hush money, I do not know.
IIRC, top 4 out of the 5 vendors in India were Chinese with the outlier being Samsung. Nothing also has a factory in South India(Chennai, I think) which is why their products are almost available in India from Day 1 but they don’t have much market share.