Walk into any mobile phone shop in Bashundhara City Shopping Complex or scroll through any e-commerce site in Bangladesh, and the pattern becomes clear almost immediately. The shelves are stacked with Xiaomi, Realme, Oppo, Vivo or Honor. The price tags are attractive. The specs look good. Buyers are not complaining either.
Over the last five years, Chinese smartphone brands have moved from being alternatives to being the default in Bangladesh. Today, they do not just compete in Bangladesh’s smartphone market. In many segments, they own it.
Bangladesh has roughly 19 crore mobile phone subscribers, according to AMTOB Industry Statistics. Between 60 and 70 per cent of them use smartphones. With a young population, rising internet use and a growing middle class, this market is expanding fast. Chinese brands saw that opportunity early and acted on it.
When the boom first started in 2022, Xiaomi alone captured a 28.8 per cent share of Bangladesh’s smartphone market, according to Counterpoint Research. That is more than one in every four smartphones sold in the country going to a single Chinese brand.
Realme, part of China’s BBK Group, which owns Oppo and Vivo, has consistently held around 14 per cent. Honor, once part of Huawei, has been building its presence steadily.
Meanwhile, Samsung held around 19.4 per cent market share as of 2024, according to statistics and market data platform Statista. That figure sounds stable, but the global trend tells a different story. Samsung’s worldwide share fell, as Chinese brands expanded across price-sensitive markets. In that same year, Xiaomi grew its global shipments by 15.4 per cent while Samsung’s declined by 1.4 per cent.
The reason Chinese brands win in Bangladesh is not complicated. A buyer spending between Tk 15,000 and Tk 25,000 will always find a Chinese phone offering more camera megapixels, more RAM and a bigger battery at the same price. Beyond specs, these brands have invested in distribution, retail partnerships, and marketing through cricket sponsorships and social media. They feel local, even though they are not.
“Only 60 to 70 per cent of our population currently uses a smartphone. If internet costs fall and usage goes up, demand for both software and smartphones will grow significantly,” said Fahim Mashroor, CEO of bdjobs.com. “There is real room for foreign investment in smartphone production here. But the combined tax and duty burden on smartphones, which is over 40 per cent, needs to come down. At the very least, import duties on components for phones assembled locally should be reduced to zero.”
That tax gap is precisely why Chinese brands have gone beyond selling. They are now manufacturing in Bangladesh. Locally assembled phones face a tax burden of only 20 to 25 per cent, compared to 57 per cent on fully imported phones. Samsung moved first, partnering with Fair Electronics in 2018.
The Chinese brands followed quickly. Oppo set up local assembly in 2019. Realme followed in 2020, with a Gazipur factory employing over 700 workers. Xiaomi arrived in October 2021, opening a smartphone manufacturing plant in Gazipur with a capacity of 3 million phones per year.
The company then went further. In 2023, it started manufacturing smartphone motherboards locally through its partner DBG Technology BD Ltd, investing another $5 million. The plant produces 6,000 circuit board assemblies per day.
“We now have a 4-million-unit annual capacity,” said Ziauddin Chowdhury, Country Manager of Xiaomi Bangladesh. “It’s a continuous process, and we have plans to expand the factory further over time.”
The production story, however, is more complicated now. In 2024, total handset production was 2.72 crore units, but most of them were feature phones. By early 2025, smartphone production had fallen by 9.30 per cent in the first quarter, according to BTRC. The grey market is widely blamed.
Industry insiders estimate that 35 to 40 per cent of Bangladesh’s total handset market is captured by informal or unauthorised channels. The interim government held talks in December 2025 on reducing smartphone import duties, but no policy change has been announced yet.
Samsung is not completely losing its position in Bangladesh. Its Galaxy A series remains popular and its after-sales network gives it an edge with older buyers and corporate clients. But on the shop floor, the dynamic has shifted.
“Samsung is still trusted by buyers who want long-term software support,” said Rafiqul Islam, a mobile retailer in Motalib Plaza in Dhaka with over 12 years in the business. “But when a young person walks in with Tk 20,000 and asks what gives them the most for their money, I rarely point them to Samsung anymore.”
The infrastructure for Chinese brands is now firmly in place. The factories are running. The supply chains are set. The workers are Bangladeshi. The question is whether the country can make more of the phone, and eventually, more of the money.
For now, if you are reading this on a Xiaomi or a Realme or a Vivo, there is a reasonable chance it was put together in Gazipur.
