Walk into any neighbourhood electronics shop in a tier-2 town today, and the silence at the counter tells the real story.
India’s TV market is valued at roughly USD 11.5 billion in FY25, growing at an 8.36% CAGR — but the growth is concentrated at the top.
Conventional LED TVs, the backbone of every small counter, saw their shipment share fall from 83% to 63% in a year, per Counterpoint Research, even as 55-inch-plus premium sets grew to nearly a third of shipments.
Sony India’s FY25 revenue rose 2.44% to INR 7,851 crore, but net profit fell 6% to INR 157 crore — proof that even a premiumisation winner is absorbing margin pain, not passing all of it downstream.
Samsung India crossed ₹1.11 lakh crore in FY25 revenue, up 11%, though this is its mobile-led national business, not a TV-specific number — Samsung does not disclose category-wise India revenue.
LG India’s total income rose 14.25% to ₹24,630.63 crore in FY25, similarly driven by its premium appliance and large-screen push.
The entry-tier specialists tell the opposite story: Sansui (Jaina Group) and Thomson/Kodak (Super Plastronics) — India’s traditional value-segment suppliers — have no recent audited numbers in the public domain, a silence that is itself telling for brands built on volume.
Correlating the slump
India’s smartphone shipments fell 4.1% in Q1 FY26, but the sub-USD 100 entry tier collapsed 59% YoY, its share crashing from 18% to 8%, per International Data Corporation (IDC) — almost the exact mirror of the LED-to-premium TV shift.
Both slumps share a root cause traceable to input-cost inflation — a global memory-chip shortage pushed component costs up 40-50%, per Counterpoint, making sub-INR 10,000 devices commercially unviable for brands to keep manufacturing.
The pattern extends to FMCG: NielsenIQ’s Q1 FY26 snapshot shows unit growth outpacing volume growth — consumers buying smaller INR 5/ 10 packs rather than skipping purchases altogether, a trade-down mechanism durables cannot replicate.
Editor’s Note
The correlation across TVs, smartphones and FMCG is not coincidental — it is the same household under the same affordability stress, responding differently depending on what the category allows.
In FMCG, a squeezed consumer downsizes the pack; in a smartphone or television, there is no equivalent downsizing left to do once the entry tier itself disappears from the shelf.
That is the structural difference that should worry policymakers and brands alike — FMCG’s small-pack economy cushions the same household that electronics retail cannot cushion, because the INR 8,000 TV and the INR 7,000 phone are simply not being made anymore.
The small electronics shop, unlike the kirana store next door, has no smaller SKU to fall back on — only a shrinking shelf and a customer who neither shops online nor walks into a Croma!
Discover more from Retail Updates
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
