Composite materials are replacing the conventional materials in various structural engineering applications where high specific strength and stiffness properties are important. Comprehensive understanding of the behaviour of these materials, including failure characteristics, is important for their confident use. Failure in composite materials initiates with failure of the most vulnerable lamina and may propagate progressively leading to gross failure of the structure, if unnoticed initially. Hence, for construction with such materials, a designer must keep in mind the failure limits of the material to achieve a safe and economic design. Cylindrical shell panels have wide industrial applications but information on first ply failure study on this shell geometry under non-uniform load is very scanty. To fulfil this lacuna the present research aims to study the nonlinear first ply failure characteristics of laminated composite cylindrical shell panels of clamped edges under sinusoidal load using well-established failure criteria including the recently proposed ones. The present finite element approach utilizes the Sanders’ linear strains for thin shells together with von-Kármán nonlinear strain components. Isoparametric Serendipity element having five degrees of freedom at each node is used. The results are presented systematically for lucid understanding and are interpreted from practical engineering angles.