New Delhi, Apr 24 (IANS): Xiaomi continued to lead the Indian smartphone market with 31.1 per cent market share while Reliance Jio topped the feature phone market with a massive 35.8 per cent share in the first quarter of 2018, a new report has said.

Xiaomi was the leader with 25 per cent market share in Q4 of 2017.

According to Counterpoint's "Market Monitor" service, Samsung with 26.2 per cent share was second, followed by Vivo at 5.8 per cent share in the smartphone segment.

Driven by the feature phone segment which doubled owing to strong shipments of Reliance JioPhone, India's overall mobile phone shipments grew 48 per cent (YoY) in Q1 2018.

Honor (Huawei) entered top five smartphone brands for the first time. Honor (146 per cent), Xiaomi (134 per cent) and OnePlus (112 per cent) were the fastest growing smartphone brands.

"Q1 2018 started off with some brands sitting on inventory post the festive season in Q4 2017, which continued throughout the quarter as industry moves to a Full View display portfolio," Karn Chauhan, Research Analyst, said in a statement.

Furthermore, the quarter was also marked with less than normal smartphone launches as very few brands refreshed their portfolio, except for Xiaomi and Samsung which benefitted from the new launches.

"However, we expect the demand to start picking up from early Q2 2018 onwards, driven by faster replacement rate of existing 2G and 3G smartphone users upgrading to 4G mobile phones," Chauhan added.

This is the first time that the top five smartphone brands accounted for more than 70 per cent market share in a single quarter.

"Xiaomi and Samsung alone captured 58 per cent of the total smartphone market. Xiaomi's Redmi Note 5 and 5 Pro were the most popular models for the Chinese brand, whereas Samsung Galaxy J7 NXT and J2 (2017) drove volumes for the Korean vendor," said Anshika Jain, Research Analyst.

The performance of Chinese brands remained strong, accounting for 57 per cent of the total smartphone market in Q1 2018, up from 53 per cent during Q1 2017.

"The demand for JioPhone continued through Q1 2018 as Reliance Jio's feature phone market share raced from 0 per cent last year to 36 per cent in Q1 2018. This demand was catalysed by the introduction of a cheaper data plan," said Tarun Pathak, Associate Director.

China based Transsion Group (the holding group of Tecno, Itel and Infinix) has become the fifth largest player with four per cent market share in Q1 2018 (combined for all three brands).

The race for the fifth position is quite close between Lava, Micromax, Honor, Nokia (HMD) and Lenovo (+Moto) brands.

Itel is the third largest player in the feature phone segment with 17 per cent growth (YoY).