Apple Shipped a Record 2.5 Million iPhones in India in 2016, Leads Premium Segment

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India is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, and pretty much every other smartphone manufacturer is trying to make their way here and sell devices. On the other hand, the Cupertino-based tech giant has a well-established market share here. Apple has been selling iPhones and other Apple products in India for a long time now. And although the company’s global share didn’t really see any spike, they surely did sell a lot of iPhones here in India. According to the new reports which we have from Counterpoint Research, Apple managed to ship 2.5 million units last year i.e., the year 2016 in India.

It has been reported that most of these sales came after the company’s 2016 flagship iPhone 7’s launch in Q4. It could either be that a lot of people bought the new iPhone 7 & 7 Plus or maybe they purchased the older iPhones since the prices were sliced by a short margin. Well, regardless of which iPhone they sold, the company came in 10th place in smartphone sales in the country during Q4. However, they still managed to be the leader in the premium phone space which is usually above 30,000 INR. Even after pricing their smartphones at such a high price, they were somehow responsible for 62-percent of sales in this particular category, which is indeed in impressive.

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Do make a note that India is a market where the smartphones that are priced below 25,000-30,000 INR gets welcomed with open arms and usually the smartphone that are priced above 40,000 INR, etc. get only half the traction. Hence Apple was definitely fighting a battle which was quite hard to win by any given chance. And not to forget about the fact that Chinese smartphone manufacturers such as Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, etc. are getting more attention in the market mainly because of the targetted price bracket. Now one might argue that Apple tried to win this battle by launching the iPhone SE which was supposedly the cheaper variant, however, even that ended up costing a whole lot of money in comparison.

While this is really surprising to see such results, it is indeed a good sign for the company to invest or look into India as a potential ground for making iPhones here and try to sell them here at comparatively lower prices. This will definitely allow them to grab more market share here in India. Well, what happens next is yet to be seen as we don’t have much info about the same. However, if you are considering the purchase of next iPhone i.e. iPhone 8, then you should be aware that it will be the company’s ten year anniversary since the launch of the first iPhone and hence we will be seeing some huge innovation or design change. With that said, stay tuned for more info on this.

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