Smartphone business in Asia

[Vikrant]

Asian smartphone market is witnessing some serious shifts. Samsung's dominance has ended both in India and in China. In India, Micromax is the leading smartphone brand now which is manufactured by an Indian company called Micromax Informatics. In China, Xiaomi, a local Chinese company has dethroned Samsung.

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For Samsung Electronics (005930:KS), the bad news in Asia isn’t confined to China. The Korean company has lost its No. 1 spot in the world’s largest smartphone market, research firm Canalys said on Monday. Pushing aside Samsung in China is Xiaomi, a young, Beijing-based company that has the world’s fastest-growing smartphone brand. Samsung, the longtime leader in China, slumped to a 12 percent market share, lagging Xiaomi’s 14 percent.

Samsung’s longtime dominance in the other giant Asian market—India—is under threat, too. Micromax Informatics (MICRO:IN), a company from the Delhi satellite city of Gurgaon that started selling phones only in 2008, is now the top brand in India. According to Counterpoint Research, Micromax has 16.6 percent of the mobile phone market (including both smartphones and feature phones), making it No. 1 in India for the first time.

While Samsung still leads in the more important smartphone market, with a 25 percent share, Micromax is making gains there, too, with 19 percent of the market. “This is a vendor which [the] mobile industry will have to keep an eye on,” Counterpoint said in a statement.

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Samsung Loses Ground in India - Businessweek

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd made possum a phone outta two cans anna piece o' string...

For Some People, the Older the Smartphone, the Better
November 30, 2015 — Between splashy launches, lavish new-phone offers (get a free HDTV on activation!) and frequent software updates that slow down your old handset, it sometimes feels like the entire technology industry is pushing you to buy the latest smartphone. Yet some holdouts resist.

Take Zak Sommerfield, 35, a software analyst in New York, who has hung onto his LG Delight flip phone for five years, even though his friends and co-workers make fun of it. “I hate smartphones, I hate how they take over people's lives and they spend all their time looking at them,” he says. “I'd love to stay on this phone forever.” People like Sommerfield are a rarity. More than 90 percent of smartphone users trade up for newer models within two years, says Ramon Llamas, who tracks mobile phones at research firm IDC. But a fraction of the population continues to cling to older phones, some 3 to 4 years old, or more.

A C3 flip phone from Pantech is shown, on a keyboard for size comparison​

These upgrade holdouts have different reasons for standing athwart techno-progress, yelling “Stop!” Some reject the trend toward ever-larger screens, preferring smaller phones that are harder to find these days. Others simply aren't wowed by the latest features, or see no reason to spend hundreds of dollars when their current phones still work fine. “Just as we saw with PCs and tablets, lifetimes on people's devices are generally getting a bit longer,” says Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at Technalysis Research. Every customer counts these days. Overall smartphone sales are slowing down, particularly in industrialized markets such as the U.S., where most people who want a smartphone already have one. IDC forecasts a 10 percent increase in worldwide smartphone sales this year, but that's slowed considerably from 27 percent growth in 2014.
Some manufacturers have turned to emerging markets for new sales, but many customers there can afford only cheaper — and less profitable — devices. To keep making money on premium phones, Apple, Samsung and their rivals are counting on regular upgrades. With its latest iPhones, Apple started an annual upgrade program that leases customers the latest models for a year. Upgrades are particularly important for Apple because iPhones account for more than half of its revenue. Sprint and T-Mobile also have leasing options aimed at yearly iPhone upgrades, but Apple's new leasing option has put even more pressure on carriers. They depend on regular upgrades to keep existing customers and sell them more services, such as bigger data plans or cloud services and storage. Since a customer upgrades only once every two or three years, it's an “important moment to capitalize on” for carriers, says FBR analyst Daniel Ives.

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