Indonesia ranks among the four largest smartphone markets in Asia Pacific in volume terms, behind China and India and currently tied with Japan. It has been one of the fastest growing countries in the region and continues to have major growth potential in volume and revenue particularly to device makers, component suppliers, and operators. Our recently published report offers a peek into the top-10 best-selling smartphone models in Indonesia in the second quarter of 2016.

The market is quite fragmented between various vendors and models, and a significant share is captured by the local vendors Smartfren and Advan Digital. Out of the leading global smartphone vendors, only Samsung and Oppo make it to the top-5 in Indonesia. Samsung is clearly ahead of the pack with its ~30 percent market share in terms of shipment volumes. Smartfren and Advan Digital as well as Oppo are competing almost neck to neck for the second, third, and fourth places, while the Taiwanese vendor Asus is not too far behind. For comparison, Apple only makes it No.9 in shipments.

Looking at the best-selling models in the Indonesian smartphone market, Samsung has five models in the top-10 list, all of which belong to the affordable Galaxy J Series. Oppo has the R5 and the Neo 7 ranking in the top-10, whereas Asus is just behind the top-3 with its Zenfone Go.

Out of all smartphone vendors, only Samsung and Oppo were able to significantly improve their market share YoY in the second quarter of 2016, while most other brands either lost ground or remained flat. Beyond the top-5 vendors, the tail end of the Indonesian smartphone market looks very challenging indeed, with vendors capturing low single-digit market share at best.

With this in mind, the recent news that BlackBerry entered into a JV called ‘BlackBerry Merah Putih’ with the major Indonesian operator TiPhone is not expected to move the needle much. BlackBerry has virtually sunk into oblivion in Indonesia, with its now-obsolete BlackBerry OS having accounted for only 1.4 percent of the market in 2015, and the significant brand equity that BlackBerry once commanded is also largely past its due date. Besides licensing out the brand, the struggling company is hoping its advanced security-related software functionality, built on top of Android, will prove its worth to device manufacturing partners and ultimately, smartphone buyers.

With Indonesia being a predominantly open-channel, retail-dominated market, even some of the numerous Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian microvendors, such as Evercoss and Mito, likely stand a better chance than BlackBerry with its limited distribution channel. With many details of the JV agreement not publicly known, it will remain to be seen if the once-iconic brand will reemerge with any significance in Indonesia and other growth markets. Nevertheless, the recent success of Oppo shows that vendors beside Samsung and the local major players can break into the market with moderate success in a relatively short time frame - in the case of Oppo, just slightly over one year.