India shipped 64.2 million smartphones in the first half of 2026, down 7.9% year on year and the lowest first-half figure in five years, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. The second quarter was worse than the first: 33.2 million units, down 11.1%. The brands taking the damage are almost entirely the Chinese ones that built their businesses on India’s affordable tier, while Samsung and Apple came through the same six months with more of the market than they started with.
India smartphone shipments: who lost ground in Q2 2026
Every major Chinese brand shrank year on year in the June quarter:
- vivo: shipments down 13.9%, still the number one brand, share slipping from 19% to 18.4%
- Xiaomi: down 10%
- OPPO: down 8.5%
- realme: down 14.2%
- POCO: down 12.3%
- iQOO: down 61%, the steepest fall in the top ten
Samsung and Apple went the other way. Samsung’s shipments were essentially flat and its share rose from 14.5% to 16.4%. Apple’s shipments also held roughly steady, lifting its share from 7.5% to 8.5%, and the iPhone 17 was the single best-selling model in India in both Q1 and Q2. On revenue rather than units, Apple now takes about 27% of the market’s value.
Why the market shrank while its value grew
The value of the Indian smartphone market rose 3.6% in the first half even as unit volumes fell, because the average selling price climbed to a record $315, up 14.4% year on year. That is not consumers spontaneously choosing to spend more. It is the memory-cost surge working its way through to the shelf — the same DRAM and NAND squeeze that has pushed prices up across the industry and that Google cited when it raised Pixel 11 prices while cutting Pro-model RAM. Online discounting, the mechanism that used to hide those increases from Indian buyers, has also thinned out.
The clearest evidence sits at the bottom of the market. Shipments of phones priced under $100 collapsed 74.3% year on year, taking that segment from 15.6% of the market to 4.5%. Manufacturers cannot hold margins on a sub-$100 phone when memory costs multiply, so those phones are simply not being made in the same numbers. Buyers at that end either stretch to a more expensive device or keep the phone they already have — and in India, where the entry tier is how most people get online in the first place, that is the more consequential half of this data than any brand’s share point.
What IDC expects next
IDC does not see relief in the second half, forecasting shipments to fall more than 15% year on year, which would put full-year volumes somewhere around 128 to 130 million units. If that holds, 2026 becomes a year in which Indians bought meaningfully fewer phones and paid meaningfully more for them.
Worth being blunt about what that means in practice: a market where the cheap tier disappears and the premium tier grows is not a market that is “premiumising” by choice. Anyone due an upgrade in the ₹10,000–₹15,000 bracket should expect less phone for the money than a year ago, and there is no indication in this data that it reverses before 2027.
Sources: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, via Digit
