Mobiles

Smartphone Market Shares

This article will focus mostly on the market shares of smartphone brands. The next section will be a short introduction about smartphone pioneers and in the end the new era of smartphone with IOS and Android being the dominants.

Market Fragment

As can be seen, Android still dominated with 82.8% market share. Samsung is still the greatest contributor with a lot of hit products such as Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. However, it seems to be that Samsung is losing customers to its number one rival: Apple. Apple has experienced a significant growth from 11.6% in 2014 to 13.9% in 2015. Sales of iPhones totaled 48 million units for the second quarter, versus 35 million units reported for the same period last year. Meanwhile, market share of Samsung declined from 26.9% to 21.6%, despite an increase in sales, managed to gain $76 million compared to $72 million last year profit, it seemed that the company hasn’t abled to keep pace with Apple iphone company.

As for Windows Phone, they has able to get 0.1% higher than the previous year. And frankly to say, things don’t look to go nicely for Microsoft since its market share dropped significantly from 3.4% in 2013 to 2.5% in 2014. However, the company’s mobile platform still able to stay on a steady road despite the fact that a huge number of their customers have shifted to another brand, Windows Phone still manage to have almost double the number of users compare to Blackberry. Blackberry seems not to have yet managed to turn things around. The company did not take respite in its fall in the world shares. Its shares during the last 3 years has been dropped at more than 4%. Apparently, Blackberry will have a hard time trying to get back to that position.

Fading Day of Smartphone Pioneers

History is always a part of who we are and it is crucial to look back at the pioneers of smartphone to understand how they gained all their success, which phrases were the prime time and the reason for their failures. What we learn after these stories is the chance to look at ourselves nowadays, to learn from mistakes and to develop in a different way.

a.Palm

Palm Inc. was founded in 1992 by Jeff Hawkins with a headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Talking about Palm, surely no one can forget the phone Treo600 – one of the first smartphone in the world. On April 28- 2010, Hewlett-Packard – CEO of HP announced that the company would purchase Palm at $5.70 a share for $1.2 billion. But in 2010, HP has sold a large amount of Palm trademarks to a Chinese Tech firm called TLC. This may be due to the very poor sales of Touchpad which made HP announced that the company would end any production and support of all Palm and WebOS designs. The situation is bad enough in 2013, in an interview with Fierce Wireless, former Palm CEO and webOS creator Jon Rubinstein has said that: “Im not sure I would have sold [Palm] to HP. That’s for sure. Talk about a waste” (Bilton 2013).

(b). Nokia

Nokia was a firm founded by Fredrik Idestam in 1871; However, it was only in 1967 that the Nokia Group (Nokia Corporation) came into existence after the merger of three subsidiaries: Nokia Company (Nokia Aktiebolag), Finnish Rubber Works Ltd. (Suomen Gummitehdas Oy) and Finnish Cable Works Ltd. (Suomen Kappelitehdas Oy). ) (Gordon 2013). In 20 years, this was the first time Nokia released a cellular phone called the Mobira Cityman 900 (Goodwin 2015). Nokia is also a key member in the development of GSM technology – technology that is still popular around the world. But perhaps, the product that made Nokia “king” is the development of Symbian OS. And this group dominated the Finnish phone market in the world for many years after the defeat of Microsoft Windows Mobile. It’s no coincidence that among the 20 best-selling phones in history, Nokia has completely dominated, not only monopolizing the top but also owning more than half of them. Nokia has gained so much popularity in many countries around the world that one cannot but mention Nokia when talking about phones. 2007 turned out to be a great year for Nokia as Apple launched the first iPhone, which would transform the mobile phone into something akin to a personal computer, with a touch screen and a host of exciting applications.

Since that time, shares of the company with the highest market capitalization in the world have fallen 75%, while Apple’s value has skyrocketed. Not only the smartphone market but also the low-end mobile phone market is getting trapped under the pressure of Android smartphones. QI/2012, Nokia officially handed over the market leader mobile phone position to Samsung, ending 14 consecutive years of holding this unique position. Then it is said that when Stephen Elop decided to use Windows Phone OS, he made the wrong strategy for Nokia. On May 1, 2013, Nokia officially announced the death of the Symbian operating system when it no longer had any value to investors, customers, partners, and on 2/9/2014, Nokia announced that it had acquired Array Devices and Its services were sold along with some patents to Microsoft for $7.2 billion (Warren 2015). This acquisition was finalized in Q1/2014. This has killed Nokia. Because after this deal, Nokia will not make any mobile device and the company will focus only on technology and patent rights.

(c)BlackBerry

BlackBerry Limited or Research in Motion Limited (RIM) is a Canadian telecommunications and wireless devices company. It is popular for its brand of smart phones and tablets, but is also known globally as a provider of security software and high reliability for industrial applications as well as mobile device management. Once a dominant player in the smart phone market, BlackBerry had a 43% US market share in 2010, but the company has suffered from a sharp decline in its profits during the past few years. There are many reasons for BlackBerry failure. Internal disagreements were one of the reasons why the iPhone was launched in the market right from the initial days. Half the leaders wanted to develop a touch phone to capture new consumer trends, while the other half wanted BlackBerry to maintain its identity with handsets that used physical keyboards.

There was disagreement over this decision until the last quarter of 2010; Then BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins wanted to launch a touchscreen smartphone Z10, but co-founder Michael Lazaridis rejected it and called it a wrong decision. Haynes didn’t listen to them and so now the result is terrible. BlackBerry lost $965 million, and most of the loss was due to expenses incurred due to the increasing number of unsold Z10s in the market (Ranger 2013). BlackBerry OS was developed based on an older platform, which was less attractive than iOS and Android. Additionally, RIM put a lot of regulation in place before allowing applications to run on BlackBerrys and this blocked developers’ creation. “Developers want to be welcomed, not controlled”.

This is why applications like Instagram or Tumblr have denied BlackBerry. BlackBerry lost two major markets due to the failure in the US (impossible to cooperate with Verizon to defeat the iPhone duo and AT&T), as well as the inability to penetrate the Chinese market. Today, the company has a small number of loyal users left in North America, several European countries, and Southeast Asia.

(d). iOS and Android Era

One of the main reasons for the failure of many smartphone pioneers is the rapid growth of iOS and Android. A report by Gartner on smartphone sales during the second quarter of 2015 showed that current versions of Android and iOS still retain a significant portion of the market share in OS devices. Analysis showed that in quarter 2/2015, total revenue from the smartphone market was $329 million, of which Android and iOS collectively accounted for 96.8%. Nevertheless, with the words of experts it is not difficult to say that there is only one leader that still dominates the smartphone market – Android – and it is supported by 82.2% of smartphones, followed by iOS with 14.6% market share. Is in place. Today the mobile OS market is dominated by big players, with iOS, Android and Windows Mobile holding the top rankings.

Apple claims to have sold more than a billion iOS devices since its launch in 2007, and Microsoft hopes to hit that number — 1 billion devices running Windows 10 in 2018 — but the winner is still out. There’s Google, which has more than 1.4 billion Android users. The last official number of Android users is 400 million more than the 1 billion users in June 2014 and 900 million more as of May 2013. Devices running on iOS such as iPhone, iPad and iPod saw a steady growth in sales.

And the final statistics revealed that Apple’s iOS device sales are now equal to the total number of Windows PCs sold. Analyst Benedict Evans has published a new milestone for Apple based on data taken from Gartner, Apple and a16z. Statistics also show that Windows PC sales have remained stable over the years, amounting to about 300 million units. Meanwhile, Apple’s iOS devices have seen massive growth. Although this includes the iPad and iPod, the growth came primarily from iPhone sales. Sales of the iPad and iPod have stagnated or even declined.

(e). New Trend in Smartphone Market

It is a fact that Apple is probably the only brand that has not launched any product to compete in the low-end smartphone market, and perhaps the company does not see any traction in this market segment. However, there is room for Samsung, LG, Sony, Xiaomi to make their impact in the low-end segment or even higher, with a price of around $300 and mid-range. The reality is that cheap products are never afraid to lose, and in the future for unknown firms that do not want to take risks in high-end products such as Xiaomi, Asus, Lenovo and LG, the cheap phone sector will still remain a potential market. What has happened is that it brings them success.

According to ICTNews – According to market analyst firm Canalys, two Chinese domestic companies Xiaomi and Huawei have overtaken Apple in smartphone sales in the quarter March to May 6/2015. After two quarters as the smartphone market leader in China, Apple has recently been pushed to third place by two local firms, Xiaomi and Huawei. It is a market released by information analysis firm Canalys. Canalys’ second quarter 2015 statistics. According to this, now Xiaomi has become the largest smartphone manufacturer in China and its share is 15.9%. Huawei is at second place with 15.7% share. After this comes Apple, Samsung and Vivo. However, the growth in China over the past few years has largely been driven by local talent. The situation is somewhat different in India.

Even in India, local players are well established in the market. But it is still battling a vast array of outside manufacturers with experience in both emerging and developed markets. Among them, Xiaomi, OnePlus and Lenovo (Motorola) are some of the Chinese companies that are already trying to compete with Micromax, Lava, Karbonn and other Indian-based companies. While Samsung and Micromax jointly have the largest share at 48 percent, the remaining 52 percent of this emerging market is up for grabs. With the Sony Xperia E and a wide range of devices it recently unveiled, all at very affordable prices, including the Motorola Moto E, it has proven that high-powered technology can be found at a friendly price. May go. And both cost around $150, or about one-quarter the price of a high-end HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S or iPhone.

The proliferation of high-performance phones has hit Samsung hard. The South Korean electronics giant has a history of covering the market with models in all sizes and prices, backed by large marketing budgets. This worked out well for Samsung, although it’s unclear how such a high cost structure and sustainability will keep up with the latest trends. But of course, makers of low-end Android phones that use Microsoft Windows Phone and Mozilla’s Firefox OS will also be affected.

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