Are Apple And Samsung Losing Ground To Chinese Handset Makers In 2014?

Posted by Hadraj Youssef On Saturday, May 24, 2014 0 Comments
By Bilal Hamdan


Technology moves at a pace that even the worlds experts struggle to keep up with. As soon as one company announces a new development, then another will announce something else. All of this research and development costs the companies a lot of money, and this means that the latest devices from the likes of Samsung and Apple are expensive. So it is no surprise to see Apple, Samsung lose ground to Chinese handset makers in Q1, which are available on the market at much cheaper prices.



The thing about certain types of technology is that there are only a fixed number of manufacturers. Take touchscreens for instance. The main supplier to Apple of these is Samsung, and this is despite the many legal battles between them.

This is because Apple has nowhere else to go to purchase the screens that they require, for the quality that they want. They do use other suppliers, but they only produce a small amount compared to Samsung. The same thing applies to the main chips, such as ARM, and many other internal components.

Samsung retained the first place with a market share of 31.2% in Q1 of 2014. It has a share of 32.4% during the same period of 2013. Apple came second with a share of 15.3% whereas it has a share of 17.5% in 2013. Huawei was placed third with a market share of 4.7%, a slight increase when compared to the same period of 2013. Lenovo was fifth with a share of 4.6% in Q1 of 2014, whereas it only had a share of 3.9% in Q1 of 2013.

So what does the future hold for mobile phones in China? More than likely, branded products will continue to lose market share, as the Chinese models improve, and continue to pick up momentum. It is likely that the branded names will hit back at some point by lowering prices, but they can only really do that on the older models.

They all have similar features, but the price is kept down on the Chinese models by using lower quality parts, or those which are now becoming dated. So the Samsung S5 may have the latest quad core, but the top spec Chinese model will have an older quad core. This doesn't really bother the majority of people, though, unless you want to run the latest games at the top quality settings.




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