Benefiting from Indian Consumers' Boycott of Chinese Goods
Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are employing aggressive marketing strategies in the Indian market to take advantage of Indian consumers’ boycott of Chinese products.
LG Electronics' smartphone sales in India increased tenfold over the past two months, according to local media outlets in India including the Economic Times.
The company has been seeking to penetrate the Indian market since 2019 under the slogan "India Specific and India First.” As part of this campaign, it released the W10 Alpha, a low-cost phone that costs about 100,000 won, in February. In the second half of 2020, the company will release six smartphones ranging from budget phones to premium phones.
Samsung Electronics is aiming to attain two goals of improving profitability and increasing its market share at the same time.
Samsung Electronics India released QLED 8K TV models, which are premium products, in the Indian market on June 30, as well as the Serif TV that looks like furniture. It sold 15 million units of TVs in India in 2019. Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, China's Xiaomi and TCL and Japan's Sony are engaged in a heated competition in the Indian TV market.
Chinese TV makers have been rapidly increasing their market shares in the Indian TV market in recent years through a price war. In 2019, Xiaomi took up 10 percent of the Indian TV market and 14 percent of the Indian smart TV market. Although Samsung Electronics ranks first with a 26 percent share in the Indian TV market and a 25 percent share in the Indian smart TV market, Xiaomi closely trails Samsung Electronics in the online shopping TV market.
Analysts say Samsung Electronics will soon return to the No. 2 position in the Indian smartphone market. It lost its No. 1 position to China's Xiaomi in 2017 and was even overtaken by China's Vivo in the fourth quarter of 2019. However, Chinese smartphone makers are losing ground in the Indian market as the Indian government has banned the use of 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok and WeChat, in the wake of a recent border dispute with China. Oppo of China, which had been rapidly increasing its market share in India's smartphone market, postponed its plan to release a 5G smartphone model in India indefinitely in the aftermath of the border dispute.