Vivo represented 15.8 percent of the Indian phone market in the third quarter of 2024 according to IDC, comfortably overtaking Samsung. It’s no newcomer, either. Vivo was India’s third-place brand as far back as 2018, according to Canalys.

It has produced some great phones and pushed the envelope in phone camera tech in particular, claiming firsts for the use of a gimbal sensor stabilization in 2020’s Vivo X50 Pro and, later on, pixel shift in the Vivo X60 series.

If you are among those who have not encountered a Vivo phone before, you might assume it’s a local brand, an Indian one. It isn’t. Vivo is from the BBK group of phone manufacturers, alongside Oppo, OnePlus, Realme, and others. These are all Chinese companies, under a parent company large enough to cast a Lovecraftian shadow. These Chinese brands are responsible for shaping where the Indian phone market is in 2024.

“Because of cheap data and the entry of the Chinese brands into India over the past seven, eight years, [Chinese manufacturers] really democratized the price points,” says Singh.

A decade or more ago, trade shows were packed with feature phones made for developing markets like India. Feature phone dominance has been flipped, and India is now entering a stage where, just like the West, the public is more accepting of and more able to buy higher-priced phones.

“’Value for money’ has been the common psyche of an Indian consumer, but it is shifting swiftly towards buying more premium phones,” says Neil Shah, vice president at CounterPoint Research. “The phone has become central to every user, with a higher ROI than even buying a car, house, or insurance. Consumers are seeing smartphones as more of an investment opportunity.” A phone, in India, can at times be everything.”

The data backs that up. According to Counterpoint, the average sale price of a smartphone in India has risen from $192 in Q3 2020 to $293 in the same quarter in 2024.

It is this effect that has helped Apple perform so well in India, with an almost 60 percent reported increase in market share from Q3 2023 to 2024, according to IDC figures.

“Considering that the average selling price of Apple is so high, it’s an achievement that Apple has done well in the past few years,” says Singh. “One of the major reasons is Apple is seen as an aspirational brand in India. It has a brand halo. Everybody would love to buy an iPhone. Not everybody can afford one.”

It’s such an appealing brand force, older generations of iPhone are estimated to account for two-thirds to three-quarters of iPhone sales each year. This in turn helps to explain why OnePlus, also popular in India, has had its market share eaten into in 2024 to the tune of almost 40 percent year-on-year, and why the mid-tier brand Realme is also on the decline. Crucially, it contributes to Samsung’s loss of almost 20 percent market share year-on-year.

“Samsung had opened all fronts, they are fighting all the battles,” says Singh. “I think there probably was some complacency also.”

This is where the Indian market starts to sound like that of Western countries. If Samsung overprices its usually competitive A-series one year, as it did in 2024, or another brand has a weak generation, it will have an effect. India not being a stagnant market does not make its players immune from the same stagnancy as elsewhere.

To prove the point, at the other end of that spectrum sits Nothing, the London-based company that became—in relative terms—the fastest-growing phone brand in India earlier this year. It also manufactures some of its phones there.

“Nothing is trying to appeal to a similar consumer as OnePlus, at least in its first four or five years,” says IDC’s Singh. For those who didn’t witness the rise of OnePlus firsthand, in 2013, it was an electric moment where a sense of innovation was combined with approachable prices. OnePlus cofounder Carl Pei is now Nothing’s CEO.

“India’s vibrant market, with its deep appreciation for technology and innovation, is optimal for a brand like Nothing to thrive,” Pei tells WIRED.

“Our 567 percent growth year-on-year in the region, driven largely by Phone (2a), reflects the strong demand for innovation in a market segment that has long felt stagnant. Phone (2a) redefined its category by offering a unique user experience true to Nothing, moving beyond the usual focus on value for money.”

A New Horizon?

Handset popularity is only the most surface-level element of the opportunities India provides for smartphone manufacturers, though. It is also serving as the key manufacturing insurance policy in a time of increasing tensions between China and the West—China is by far the most productive phone manufacturing hub in the world.

Apple’s iPhone 15 was made in India in partnership with long-term Taiwanese manufacturing partner Foxconn, which in hindsight now seems like the test run for the most recent iPhone 16 family. A portion of all of this year’s models, from the iPhone 16 to the iPhone 16 Pro Max, is made in India.

Two years ago, JPMorgan estimated that 25 percent of all iPhones would be made outside of China by 2025, up from 5 percent at the time. As of the end of fiscal year 2024, $14 billion worth of iPhones—around 14 percent of the global total—were made in India.

Still, Apple’s efforts seem piecemeal next to those of Samsung. It opened a huge phone manufacturing store in Uttar Pradesh’s Noida back in 2018. At the time it was called the largest phone factory in the world, and no one appears to have laid claim to the title since.

Not only that, Samsung also closed its last Chinese factory in 2019, meaning most of its phones are now manufactured in India, Vietnam, or South Korea. At face value, you could almost assume India has the potential to become a full replacement for China as a manufacturing base.

It certainly makes sense commercially. India’s wages are low by Western standards, it’s not short of technical expertise, and there’s already a huge local market to service.

Samsung is by no means fully divested from the Chinese production line, though. Samsung now makes some (read: tens of millions) of its lower-end models in partnership with Chinese JDMs—joint development manufacturers—and that number has been increasing dramatically since 2020.

The Elec reports this JDM style of manufacturing will account for 25 percent of Samsung’s output in 2024. Any suggestion that a phone maker can simply shift its manufacturing base away from China to India is overly simplistic.

“You might be hearing terms of ‘manufacturing in India’ and ‘made in India,’ but you have to be slightly careful when the case right now is really ‘assembled in India,’” says IDC’s Singh.

Assembling a phone’s components and making those components are different ball games. And one can be an order of magnitude more complex and difficult than the other.

An Uncertain Future

The complexity of phone manufacturing, and why a quick switch to India is near impossible, can be most pointedly explored with a quick look into how CPUs are made.

Most phone makers don’t design their own processors, for a start. An Android phone is likely to have a SoC (system on chip) processor from Qualcomm, MediaTek, or the lesser known Unisoc. However, even these brands do not physically produce the chips. They just design them—it’s why these companies are known as “fabless.”