Telecom Lead India: By year-end 2014, three of the top five mobile handset vendors will be Chinese, according to Gartner.
Huawei and ZTE are the top Chinese phone makers. Lenovo is also gearing up to grab market share in smart phone segment.
Going by the Gartner prediction, Nokia, BlackBerry, LG, Sony, HTC, etc. are likely to face tough market conditions globally. Samsung and Apple are the top two players in phone market globally.
Mobile phone penetration in emerging markets has resulted in a changing of the guard in terms of the leading vendors.
The openness of Android creates new markets for OEMs that previously did not have the necessary software expertise and engineering capabilities. The market continues to consolidate around Android and iOS, with other ecosystems struggling to gain traction, and, with most vendors committed to Android, it has become difficult to differentiate.
The result is that the traditional mobile phone players are getting squeezed, being unable to compete with Apple and Samsung at the high end and struggling to differentiate from aggressive new vendors, most notably Huawei and ZTE, which are using the same Android platform for their models, according to Gartner.
Chinese vendors have the opportunity to leverage their strong position in the domestic Chinese market for entry-level smartphones and expand to other regions, because this is not just an emerging-market phenomenon.
According to a recent report in TelecomLead.com, the global mobile phone market grew 6.1 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2011, as the feature phone market declined faster than anticipated, which lowered the market growth its lowest point in over two years, according to the IDC.
IDC revealed that vendors shipped 427.4 million units in Q4 2011 compared to 402.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2010. In China, competition in the Android market intensified as mid-range vendors, such as Lenovo, Coolpad, and Huawei, shipped large numbers. However, the worldwide Android market was dominated by Samsung, followed by HTC and LG.
