JioPhone captures 26% market share after just four months

In a matter of just four short months, Reliance Jio’s much touted about 4G VoLTE feature phone, JioPhone now leads the feature phone market in India.

JioPhone has a market share of 26%, a report by Counterpoint Research.

In his AGM speech, Mukesh Ambani said the company will try to make available 50 lakh JioPhones per week. After August, Jio suspended the pre-bookings of its feature phone due to an ‘overwhelming’ response.

“This surprising annual growth can be attributed to higher demand for smartphones and more so for feature phones. The strong growth is also partly due to last year’s weak quarter due to the impact of demonetization. Feature phones have been driven by the disruptive entry of Jiophone, which expanded the feature phone segment. The quarter also saw new device launches and strong promotions from various brands looking to catalyse demand after Diwali,” Karn Chauhan, Research Analyst at Counterpoint Research said.

Jio reportedly shipped over 150 lakh JioPhones in Q3 FY18, a report by TelecomTalk said.

Samsung ranked second among the feature phone makers with a market share of 15%. Micromax and iTel follow with 9% and 7% share.

Xiaomi also piped Samsung to become the number one smartphone in market share with 25% hold.

“The competitive landscape has changed significantly in the last year, with the rise of brands such as Xiaomi, OPPO, VIVO in the smartphone segment and players such as Reliance Jio, Nokia HMD and iTel in the feature phone segment — all able to disrupt the market with high-quality and attractively-priced offerings. During the second half, players such as Xiaomi was particularly disruptive with an aggressively-priced, broad portfolio taken to market with an effective channel expansion strategy. This helped Xiaomi to surpass the long-time market leader, Samsung, for the first time ever. This performance ended Samsung’s six year market dominance,” Tarun Pathak, Associate Director at Counterpoint Research said.

After the launch of the JioPhone, many operators followed suit and launched ‘affordable smartphones’ in association with handset makers. The telcos also made sure to include bundled handsets in the mix, which are a rising trend in the industry.

“With Jio at least the value proposition is pretty high because the existing feature phone users do not want to migrate to smartphones and they are getting smartphone like features in a feature phone itself,” Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research told Zeebiz in an earlier report.