The report shows this seasonal spike in third quarter of the year can be attributed to the channel preparation for the festive season, mega online sales and early import of smartphones owing to Chinese holidays in October.

The online share of smartphone shipments increased to 31.6 percent with 35 percent quarter-on-quarter growth, due to strong performance by key online players primarily from China-based vendors. The report further indicates that Lenovo Group continues to lead online channel followed by Xiaomi.

Lenovo Group accounts for almost one-fourth of total online smartphone shipments driven primarily by Lenovo’s K5 series and Motorola’s G4 series models. Also, Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 3 and newly launched Redmi 3S fuelled the online shipments to a large extent.

4G smartphone shipments grew 24.8 percent over previous quarter in the third quarter. 7 out of 10 smartphone shipped in the quarter were 4G-enabled and 9 out of 10 smartphone sold by eTailers were 4G.

Samsung leads the Indian smartphone market with 23 percentage share with 8 percent sequential growth and 9.7 percent growth from the same period last year, the study shows. Lenovo Group (including Motorola) climbed to second place with 9.6 percent share of smartphones. Lenovo Group’s shipment jumped 46.1 percent in the third quarter compared to the previous quarter. Motorola’s volume almost doubled quarter-on-quarter driven by newly launched E3 Power and G4 models. K5 series continues to be lead runner for Lenovo accounting for over 40 percent of its total volume.

Micromax slips to third position with a 32 percent decline in smartphone shipments over previous quarter. Xiaomi makes its debut in top 5 as its shipments doubled over previous quarter. The vendor grew more than 2.5 times over the same period last year. Reliance Jio sustains its fifth position despite a healthy 20.9 percent growth over previous quarter.

Overall mobile phone market shipments closed at 72.3 million units in the third quarter of 2016, with an 18.1 percent sequential growth. Feature phones shipments reached 39.9 million units in the quarter, with a 18.6 percent quarter-over-quarter growth. However, the feature phone market declined at 12.4 percent over the same period last year, pulling down the overall mobile phone shipments marginally by 3.3 percent.