Many of the Chinese brands are eagerly embracing flash sales as new strategy to sustain growth in the Indian smartphone market. Huawei, with its Honor brand has taken the route for some time now and the latest to embrace it has been Oppo. Xiaomi was the among the first to adopt flash sales with great success and the vendor now scaled up to be the top smartphone vendor in India, per the latest report available here, from our Handset Country Share Tracker (HCST) Service.
Oppo launched F7 in the Indian market this week and will be holding flash sales for the device on the Flipkart eCommerce platform on April 2nd. The firm aims to sell 10,000 units and will back it up with cashback offers, free screen replacements and data tying up with the like of Reliance-Jio. The strategy is new for Oppo as it has been primarily an offline player and is now moving aggressively to online channels too. We estimate online channels to have accounted for over 35% of the smartphone market in the country in Q4 2017.
In the last quarter, many of the Chinese vendors including Oppo have witnessed their smartphone market share shrink, as Xiaomi grew to take up more than a quarter of the market. We expect many of the vendors going back to their drawing boards in 2018, as they revisit their 4P’s for the India market.
