A ₹15,000-crore wipeout: how Xiaomi lost India’s smartphone race to Vivo, Samsung and Apple
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.NEW DELHI: Xiaomi once sold one in every four smartphones in India. By 2025, it had fallen out of the country’s top five brands.
The reversal marks one of the steepest declines in India’s smartphone market, as rivals moved into premium devices and strengthened their offline retail networks.At its peak in 2021, the company shipped over 40 million smartphones in India—the highest-ever annual tally for a single brand in the country, according to International Data Corp. (IDC).
Samsung India, its nearest rival, sold 28 million devices that year.Xiaomi led India’s smartphone market for five consecutive years from 2017 to 2022.By 2025, Xiaomi shipped just 13.7 million devices, according to data from IDC.Electronics, retail and manufacturing consultants said the fall was driven by three factors—government crackdowns in 2022, leadership exits in 2023 and 2024, and failure to keep pace with premiumization. The latter, they said, also underscores how brand stickiness can determine long-term growth.The April 2022 Enforcement Directorate-related crackdown was widely seen as affecting brand perception, along with the exits of India chiefs Manu Jain in January 2023 and Muralikrishnan Balakrishnan in November 2024.In FY22, Xiaomi India reported ₹39,099 crore in revenue and ₹1,058 crore in net profit, according to filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs accessed via Tofler.
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