Google's Pixel smartphones struggle to click in world's fastest growing smartphone market

Despite Google’s aggressive push to lure the Indian market into purchasing its Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, the company has failed to impress the price conscious country.

Google’s first branded smartphones went on sale in India late August, the same month they were globally unveiled. This was a stark deviation from the general norm that sees companies take weeks — and sometimes months — in bringing their top smartphones to India.

But it appears Google’s inclination to India didn’t return same response. The company has so far sold little less than 50,000 units of Google Pixel and Pixel XL in India, according to Tarun Pathak, senior analyst at marketing research firm Counterpoint.

Other analysts and insiders have arrived at similar figures. According to the Economic Times, which cites those insiders, Google shipped about 40,000 Pixel phone units in India.

Analysts blame Google's pricing strategy for the slow uptake for its Pixel smartphones. The starting price of the Pixel smartphone is Rs 57,000 ($855), whereas the base Pixel XL model was selling at Rs 67,000 ($1,005). People who wanted to purchase the top-of-the-line 128GB variant of the Pixel had to pay Rs 66,000 ($990), whereas 128GB of the Pixel XL was setting people back by Rs 76,000 ($1,140).

Any phone that costs this much is going to find it tough to fare well with the Indian market, which mostly invests in phones that are priced under $150.

"Premium market is very niche going at a rate of close to million units per quarter," Pathak adds. This is a fraction of the total number of smartphones that ship every quarter. For instance, more than 27 million smartphones shipped in India in Q2 2016, according to IDC.

To make things tougher for Google, many people who do decide to spend that sort of money on a smartphone end up picking up an iPhone. According to Counterpoint, a quarter of the premium smartphones sold in India are iPhones.

The other popular premium smartphones come from Samsung, which currently sells the Galaxy S7 for Rs 43,400 ($637) and the Galaxy S7 edge for Rs 50,900 ($747), both significantly cheaper than Google's Pixel smartphones.

In order to ramp up sales, online retailers like Flipkart and Amazon India are offering flat discounts of up to Rs 10,000 ($147) on Pixel smartphones in some cases.