While much of India is waiting for the roll out of the 4G services by Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Jio, the company has already started retailing its Voice Over LTE (VoLTE) supporting handsets branded as LYF and the latest IDC data for the first quarter of Indian Smartphone market has some impressive rankings for the brand. According to the market research firm IDC, Relaince has replaced Lava as the fifth largest smartphone vendor in the first quarter of calendar 2016 and more impressively is the third biggest 4G Smartphone vendor in India, behind Samsung and Lenovo. When they finally offer their LTE services which is expected very soon, the LYF handsets would witness further big upswing. While Samsung continued its top position and Reliance making an impressive foray, it’s the Chinese OEM’s who are gaining traction at the expense of other Indian brands like Micromax, Lava and Karbonn.The Indian brands together dropped 20.4% sequentially while the segment itself fell by 8.2% quarter-0n-quarter. Samsung, Mircormax and Intex still are on the top of the chart on the overall Smartphone sales, with Samsung leading 26.6% market share, with the J series accounting for 75% of their sales. Micromax inspite of the 17.9% dip in the quarter to quarter sales, still manages to be on the second spot and Intex managed to push Lenovo to fourth place again thanks to its over 15 4G models. Clearly showing the consumer preference for future proofing with LTE supporting devices. Lenovo might recover in the next quarter with K4 note and K5 Note Plus doing pretty well for them. Xiaomi, LeEco, Oppo, Vivo and Coolpad are seeing good gains with Oppo and Vivo doing strongly in the offline channels and the others pushing their way up through the e-commerce sales. It would be interesting to see how north Reliance can go once their LTE service is operational pan India. ]]>
