Samsung Maintains its Market Dominance followed by OPPO and ASUS in Indonesia

Smartfren. As a local vendor that also operates as a telco provider, Smartfren tried to book more revenue from data services and recorded a 17% sequential decline for its smartphone shipment. Aside from bundling programs with leading smartphones such as the Samsung J Series, Smartfren have been consistent in promoting their Mifi product with attractive bundling program.

Lenovo decreased sequentially relative to the non-peak period choosing to focus on sell-out instead. A6000, A1000 and A2010a were their top 3 models shipped in 2016Q3 in terms of units.

Overall Positive Outlook for Indonesia

IDC maintains the forecast for 2016 as the market is expected to expand significantly in Q4 and high demand during the festive season will allow vendors to increase shipment volume to reach targets. In addition, the continuous economic improvement from heavy infrastructure investment will continue to boost the Indonesia economy.

The Local Content regulation (TKDN) is getting more accepted in a sense of clearer approach. A number of vendors including Xiaomi, LG, and Blackberry have now showed commitment to comply with this regulation. In the short term, it is expected that the industry will be focusing on local assembly but the challenge remains from the inadequate component supply chain ecosystem. But in the longer term, depending on the effectiveness of incentives provided by the government, more component manufacturers could move to Indonesia. This means that vendors would need to be prepared to have end-to-end manufacturing in Indonesia instead of just assembly. Hence, we expect that the future outlook will remain positive for 2017 onwards,” ends, Haryo.

Channel dynamics

With the intense competition and relatively low demand in 2016Q3, it caused vendors to put their utmost focus on liquidating stocks through improvement to their channels. The Direct to retail approach by cutting down the intermediaries has proven to help the sell-out of OPPO. IDC believes smartphone vendors will try to replicate this distribution strategy soon but this will require a strong retail relationship which only the larger vendors will be able to execute given the large volumes that they have and that they are more established in the market.

Telco collaboration

“Telco providers need to challenge the status quo and find ways to innovate as their core business continues to be pressured by over the top players which could be significant threats in revenue loss even as mobile data traffic grows exponentially. With an advanced network infrastructure and strategic partnership between telco providers, over the top players and hardware vendors, IDC believes that Telco providers and smartphone vendors can leverage the increasing demand for over the top players to drive up ARPU as well as brand exposure,” ends, Haryo.